Author Description

Applications from condensed matter physics, statistical mechanics and elementary particle theory appear in the book. An obvious omission here is general relativity--we apologize for this. We originally intended to discuss general relativity. However, both the need to keep the size of the book within the reasonable limits and the fact that accounts of the topology and geometry of relativity are already available, for example, in The Large Scale Structure of Space-Time by S. Hawking and G. Ellis, made us reluctantly decide to omit this topic.