The theory of motives was created by Grothendieck in the 1960s as he searched for a universal cohomology theory for algebraic varieties. The theory of pure motives is well established as far as the construction is concerned. Pure motives are expected to have a number of additional properties predicted by Grothendieck's standard conjectures, but these conjectures remain wide open. The theory for mixed motives is still incomplete.

This book deals primarily with the theory of pure motives. The exposition begins with the fundamentals: Grothendieck's construction of the category of pure motives and examples. Next, the standard conjectures and the famous theorem of Jannsen on the category of the numerical motives are discussed. Following this, the important theory of finite dimensionality is covered. The concept of Chow-Kunneth decomposition is introduced, with discussion of the known results and the related conjectures, in particular the conjectures of Bloch-Beilinson type. We finish with a chapter on relative motives and a chapter giving a short introduction to Voevodsky's theory of mixed motives.

The systematic use of Koszul cohomology computations in algebraic geometry can be traced back to the foundational work of Mark Green in the 1980s. Green connected classical results concerning the ideal of a projective variety with vanishing theorems for Koszul cohomology. Green and Lazarsfeld also stated two conjectures that relate the Koszul cohomology of algebraic curves with the existence of special divisors on the curve. These conjectures became an important guideline for future research. In the intervening years, there has been a growing interaction between Koszul cohomology and algebraic geometry. Green and Voisin applied Koszul cohomology to a number of Hodge-theoretic problems, with remarkable success. More recently, Voisin achieved a breakthrough by proving Green's conjecture for general curves; soon afterwards, the Green-Lazarsfeld conjecture for general curves was proved as well. This book is primarily concerned with applications of Koszul cohomology to algebraic geometry, with an emphasis on syzygies of complex projective curves. The authors' main goal is to present Voisin's proof of the generic Green conjecture, and subsequent refinements. They discuss the geometric aspects of the theory and a number of concrete applications of Koszul cohomology to problems in algebraic geometry, including applications to Hodge theory and to the geometry of the moduli space of curves.