Recent Developments in General Relativity. Este artículo no está disponible.Recent Developments in General Relativity

The book is the result of the Italian conference on General Relativity, held in Italy in September 1998. One of the main features of this conference has been to bring together mathematicians and physicists, experts in different fields: General Relativity, Variational and Topological methods, Differential Geometry, Astrophysics. Classical and Quantum aspects of General Relativity have been debated and various new results have been presented. Perspectives on the search of Gravitational waves have been illustrated. These methods permit to study the geodesical connectedness of space-times and to relate to topological properties to the multiplicity of the geodesics joining two given events. Critical point Morse theory has been used to study light rays on Lorentzian manifolds and to interpret the gravitational lensing effect.

The 13th Italian Conference on General Relativity and Gravitational Physics was held in Cala Corvino-Monopoli (Bari) from September 21to September 25, 1998. The Conference, which is held every other year in different Italian locations, has brought together, as in the earlier conferences in this series, those scientists who are interested and actively work in all aspects of general relativity, from both the mathematical and the physical points of view: from classical theories of gravitation to quantum gravity, from relativistic astrophysics and cosmology to experiments in gravitation. About 70 participants came from Departments of Astronomy and Astrophysics, Departments of Mathematics and Departments of Experimental and Theoretical Physics from all over the Country; in addition a few Italian scientists working abroad kindly accepted invitations from the Scientific Committee. The good wishes of the University and of the Politecnico di Bari were conveyed by the director of Diparti­ mento Interuniversitario di Matematica, Prof. Franco Altomare. These proceedings contain the contributions of the two winners of the SIGRAV prizes, the invited talks presented at the Conference and most of the contributed talks. We thank all of our colleagues, who did their best to prepare their manuscripts. The pleasant atmosphere induced by the beauty of the place was greatlyenhanced not only by the participation of so many colleagues, who had lively discussions about science well beyond Conference hours, but also by the feeling of hospitalityextended to the participants by the staff of the Cala Corvino Hotel, where the Conference was held.