Groupoids, Inverse Semigroups, and their Operator Algebras

In recent years, it has become increasingly clear that there are important connections relating three concepts -- groupoids, inverse semigroups, and operator algebras. There has been a great deal of progress in this area over the last two decades, and this book gives a careful, up-to-date and reasonably extensive account of the subject matter.  After an introductory first chapter, the second chapter presents a self-contained account of inverse semigroups, locally compact and r-discrete grou