Thesis (Ph. D. in Mathematics)--Vanderbilt University, May 2007. / Title from title screen. Includes bibliographical references.

Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) / In 1970, Serge Novikov made a statement which is now called, "The Novikov Conjecture" and is considered to be one of the major open problems in topology. This statement was motivated by the endeavor to understand manifolds of arbitrary dimensions by relating the surgery map with the homology of the fundamental group of the manifold, which becomes diffi cult for manifolds of dimension greater than two. The Novikov Conjecture is interesting because it comes up in problems in many different branches of mathematics like algebra, analysis, K-theory, differential geometry, operator algebras and representation theory. Yu later proved the Novikov Conjecture holds for all closed manifolds with discrete fundamental groups that are coarsely embeddable into a Hilbert space. The class of groups that are uniformly embeddable into Hilbert Spaces includes groups of Property A which were introduced by Yu. In fact, Property A is generally a property of metric spaces and is stable under quasi-isometry. In this thesis, a new version of Yu's Property A in the case of locally compact groups is introduced. This new notion of Property A coincides with Yu's Property A in the case of discrete groups, but is different in the case of general locally compact groups. In particular, Gromov's locally compact hyperbolic groups is of Property A.