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This volume contains the proceedings of the 2016 AMS von Neumann Symposium on Topological Recursion and its Influence in Analysis, Geometry, and Topology, which was held from July 4–8, 2016, at the Hilton Charlotte University Place, Charlotte, North Carolina. The papers contained in the volume present a snapshot of rapid and rich developments in the emerging research field known as topological recursion. It has its origin around 2004 in random matrix theory and also in Mirzakhani's work on the volume of moduli spaces of hyperbolic surfaces. Topological recursion has played a fundamental role in connecting seemingly unrelated areas of mathematics such as matrix models, enumeration of Hurwitz numbers and Grothendieck's dessins d'enfants, Gromov-Witten invariants, the A-polynomials and colored polynomial invariants of knots, WKB analysis, and quantization of Hitchin moduli spaces. In addition to establishing these topics, the volume includes survey papers on the most recent key accomplishments: discovery of the unexpected relation to semi-simple cohomological field theories and a solution to the remodeling conjecture. It also provides a glimpse into the future research direction; for example, connections with the Airy structures, modular functors, Hurwitz-Frobenius manifolds, and ELSV-type formulas.

In “The Yang-Mills equations over Riemann surfaces”, Atiyah and Bott studied Yang-Mills functional over a Riemann surface from the point of view of Morse theory. In “Yang-Mills Connections on Nonorientable Surfaces”, the authors study Yang-Mills functional on the space of connections on a principal $G_{\mathbb{R}}$-bundle over a closed, connected, nonorientable surface, where $G_{\mathbb{R}}$ is any compact connected Lie group. In this monograph, the authors generalize the discussion in “The Yang-Mills equations over Riemann surfaces” and “Yang-Mills Connections on Nonorientable Surfaces”. They obtain explicit descriptions of equivariant Morse stratification of Yang-Mills functional on orientable and nonorientable surfaces for non-unitary classical groups $SO(n)$ and $Sp(n)$.