The School on High-Dimensional Manifold Topology took place at the Abdus Salam ICTP, Trieste from 21 May 2001 to 8 June 2001 under the direction of F.T. Farrell (State University of New York at Binghamton) and W. Lück (Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität Münster). The local organizer was  Lothar Göttsche (ICTP).

The focus of the school was on the classification of manifolds and related aspects of K-theory, geometry, and operator theory.  The topics covered included:  surgery theory, algebraic K- and L-theory, controlled topology, homology manifolds, exotic aspherical manifolds, homeomorphism and diffeomorphism groups, and scalar curvature.  Several conjectures were discussed including those due to:  Borel, Novikov, Gromov-Lawson-Rosenberg, Baum-Connes, and Farrell-Jones.  The school consisted of 2 weeks of lecture courses and one week of conference.  This two-part lecture notes volume  contains the notes of most of the lecture courses.  
The proceedings of the conference will be published as a separate monograph by  World Scientific Publishing Co.

The school was financially supported by the ICTP and by grants from the European commission, the National Science Foundation of the USA, and the Sonderforschungsbereich 478. We are very thankful for this support.

We, Tom Farrell and Wolfgang Lück, would like to take this opportunity to thank the Abdus Salam ICTP and Lothar Göttsche for the hospitality and excellent organization.  We are grateful to all the lectures and speakers of the conference for their contribution to the success of the school.