In this survey lecture I will discuss a new class of complex manifolds and of holomorphic maps between them which I introduced in 2009 (F. Forstneric, Oka Manifolds, C. R. Acad. Sci. Paris, Ser. I, 347 (2009) 1017-1020). Roughly speaking, a complex manifold Y is said to be an Oka manifold if Y admits plenty of holomorphic maps from any Stein manifold (or Stein space) X to Y, in a certain precise sense. In particular, the inclusion of the space of holomorphic maps of X to Y into the space of continuous maps must be a weak homotopy equivalence. One of the main results is that this class of manifolds can be characterized by a simple Runge approximation property for holomorphic maps from complex Euclidean spaces C^n to Y, with approximation on compact convex subsets of C^n. This answers in the affirmative a question posed by M. Gromov in 1989. I will also discuss the Oka properties of holomorphic maps and their characterization by approximation properties.

Any matrix in $SL_n (\mathbb C)$ can be written as a product of elementary matrices using the Gauss elimination process. If instead of the field of complex numbers, the entries in the matrix are elements of a more general ring, this becomes a delicate question. In particular, rings of complex-valued functions on a space are interesting cases. A deep result of Suslin gives an affirmative answer for the polynomial ring in $m$ variables in case the size $n$ of the matrix is at least 3. In the topological category, the problem was solved by Thurston and Vaserstein. For holomorphic functions on $\mathbb C^m$, the problem was posed by Gromov in the 1980s. We report on a complete solution to Gromov's problem. A main tool is the Oka-Grauert-Gromov h-principle in complex analysis. Our main theorem can be formulated as follows: In the absence of obvious topological obstructions, the Gauss elimination process can be performed in a way that depends holomorphically on the matrix. This is joint work with Bj\"orn Ivarsson.