Connections, Definite Forms, and Four-Manifolds

The central theme of this book is the study of the relationship between the geometry and topology of four-manifolds. The authors' aim is to present a lucid introduction to moduli space techniques (for vector bundles with SO(3) as structure group) and to apply them to four-manifolds. The authors have adopted a topologists' perspective. They have included explicit calculations using the Atiyah-Singer index theorem; results covered include Donaldson's Theorem and those of Fintushel and Stern.