Affine Algebraic Geometry: The Russell Festschrift(CRM Proceedings & Lecture Notes)

This volume grew out of an international conference which was held in June 2009 at McGill University, in honour of Professor Peter Russell, on the occasion of his 70th birthday and his retirement from McGill. It contains 19 refereed articles, essentially all in the area of affine algebraic geometry and, more specifically, in the following subjects: automorphisms and group actions, surfaces, embeddings of certain rational curves in the affine plane, and problems in positive characteristic geometry. These are also some of the themes running through the very substantial body of work done by Professor Russell in this relatively young branch of algebraic geometry. The volume also includes a foreword, in which Professor Russell shares some personal reminiscences on the development of affine algebraic geometry, a field he describes as ""loosely speaking, the study of affine spaces and algebraic varieties closely resembling them.

Table of Contents:
Newton trees at infinity of algebraic curves by P. Cassou-Nogues Polynomials $f(X,Y,Z)$ of low LND-degree by D. Daigle Corrigendum to our paper ""Birational transformations of weighted graphs'' by H. Flenner, S. Kaliman, and M. Zaidenberg Bivariate analogues of Chebyshev polynomials with application to embeddings of affine spaces by G. Freudenburg The pencil of translates of a line in the plane by R. Ganong A geometric proof of Boutot's result on singularities of quotients by R. V. Gurjar On the present state of the Andersen-Lempert theory by S. Kaliman and F. Kutzschebauch Group actions on affine cones by T. Kishimoto, Y. Prokhorov, and M. Zaidenberg $\mathbb{C}^*$ in $\mathbb{C}^2$ is birationally equivalent to a line by M. Koras Initial algebras and the Jung-van der Kulk theorem by S. Kuroda Holomorphic curves on irregular varieties of general type starting from surfaces by S. S.-Y. Lu Locally nilpotent derivations of affine domains by L. Makar-Limanov Equivariant derivations and additive group actions by K. Masuda Frobenius sandwiches of affine algebraic surfaces by M. Miyanishi Automorphism groups of Koras-Russell threefolds of the first kind by L. Moser-Jauslin Recent progress in the geometry of $\mathbb{Q}$-acyclic surfaces by K. Palka On the Makar-Limanov, Derksen invariants, and finite automorphism groups of algebraic varieties by V. L. Popov Embeddings of hyperbolas by A. Sathaye Groups of Russell type and tango structures by Y. Takeda