In recent years, increasingly complex methods have been brought into play in the treatment of geometric and topological problems for partial differential operators on manifolds. This collection of papers, resulting from a Workshop on Spectral Geometry of Manifolds with Boundary and Decomposition of Manifolds, provides a broad picture of these methods with new results. Subjects in the book cover a wide variety of topics, from recent advances in index theory and the more general theory of spectral invariants on closed manifolds and manifolds with boundary, to applications of those invariants in geometry, topology, and physics.Papers are grouped into four parts: Part I gives an overview of the subject from various points of view. Part II deals with spectral invariants, such as traces, indices, and determinants. Part III is concerned with general geometric and topological questions. Part IV deals specifically with problems on manifolds with singularities. The book is suitable for graduate students and researchers interested in spectral problems in geometry.
