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What is clear and easy to grasp attracts us; complications deter David Hilbert The material presented in this volume is based on discussions conducted in peri odically held seminars by the Nonlinear Functional Analysis research group of the University of Seville. This book is mainly addressed to those working or aspiring to work in the field of measures of noncompactness and metric fixed point theory. Special em phasis is made on the results in metric fixed point theory which were derived from geometric coefficients defined by means of measures of noncompactness and on the relationships between nonlinear operators which are contractive for different measures. Several topics in these notes can be found either in texts on measures of noncompactness (see [AKPRSj, [BG]) or in books on metric fixed point theory (see [GK1], [Sm], [Z]). Many other topics have come from papers where the authors of this volume have published the results of their research over the last ten years. However, as in any work of this type, an effort has been made to revise many proofs and to place many others in a correct setting. Our research was made possible by partial support of the D.G.I.C.y´T. and the Junta de Andalucia.

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I The fixed point theorems of Brouwer and Schauder.- 1 The fixed point theorem of Brouwer and applications.- 2 The fixed point theorem of Schauder and applications.- II Measures of noncompactness.- 1 The general notion of a measure of noncompactness.- 2 The Kuratowski and Hausdorff measures of noncompactness.- 3 The separation measure of noncompactness.- 4 Measures of noncompactness in Banach sequences spaces.- 5 Theorem of Darbo and Sadovskii and applications.- III Minimal sets for a measure of noncompactness.- 1 ›-minimal sets.- 2 Minimalizable measures of noncompactness.- IV Convexity and smoothness.- 1 Strict convexity and smoothness.- 2 k-uniform convexity.- 3 k-uniform smoothness.- V Nearly uniform convexity and nearly uniform smoothness.- 1 Nearly uniformly convex Banach spaces.- 2 Nearly uniformly smooth Banach spaces.- 3 Uniform Opial condition.- VI Fixed points for nonexpansive mappings and normal structure.- 1 Existence of fixed points for nonexpansive mappings: Kirk´s theorem.- 2 The coefficient N(X) and its connection with uniform convexity.- 3 The weakly convergent sequence coefficient.- 4 Uniform smoothness, near uniform convexity and normal structure.- 5 Normal structure in direct sum spaces.- 6 Computation of the normal structure coefficients in Lp-spaces.- VII Fixed point theorems in the absence of normal structure.- 1 Goebel-Karlovitz´s lemma and Lin´s lemma.- 2 The coefficient M(X) and the fixed point property.- VIII Uniformly Lipschitzian mappings.- 1 Lifshitz characteristic and fixed points.- 2 Connections between the Lifshitz characteristic and certain geometric coefficients.- 3 The normal structure coefficient and fixed points.- IX Asymptotically regular mappings.- 1 A fixed point theorem for asymptotically regular mappings.- 2 Connections between the ?-characteristic and some other geometric coefficients.- 3 The weakly convergent sequence coefficient and fixed points.- X Packing rates and ›-contractiveness constants.- 1 Comparable measures of noncompactness.- 2 Packing rates of a metric space.- 3 Connections between the packing rates and the normal structure coefficients.- 4 Packing rates in lp-spaces.- 5 Packing rates in Lpspaces.- 6 Packing rates in direct sum spaces.- References.- List of Symbols and Notations.

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