Differential geometry is a mathematical discipline that studies the geometry of smooth shapes and smooth spaces, otherwise known as smooth manifolds. It uses the techniques of differential calculus, integral calculus, linear algebra and multilinear algebra. The field has its origins in the study of spherical geometry as far back as antiquity. It also relates to astronomy, the geodesy of the Earth, and later the study of hyperbolic geometry by Lobachevsky. The simplest examples of smooth spaces are the plane and space curves and surfaces in the three-dimensional Euclidean space, and the study of these shapes formed the basis for development of modern differential geometry during the 18th and 19th centuries.
In physics, string theory is a theoretical framework in which the point-like particles of particle physics are replaced by one-dimensional objects called strings. String theory describes how these strings propagate through space and interact with each other. On distance scales larger than the string scale, a string looks just like an ordinary particle, with its mass, charge, and other properties determined by the vibrational state of the string. In string theory, one of the many vibrational states of the string corresponds to the graviton, a quantum mechanical particle that carries the gravitational force. Thus, string theory is a theory of quantum gravity.
Shing-Tung Yau is a Chinese-American mathematician. He is the director of the Yau Mathematical Sciences Center at Tsinghua University and Professor Emeritus at Harvard University. Until 2022 he was the William Caspar Graustein Professor of Mathematics at Harvard, at which point he moved to Tsinghua.
The Chern–Simons theory is a 3-dimensional topological quantum field theory of Schwarz type developed by Edward Witten. It was discovered first by mathematical physicist Albert Schwarz. It is named after mathematicians Shiing-Shen Chern and James Harris Simons, who introduced the Chern–Simons 3-form. In the Chern–Simons theory, the action is proportional to the integral of the Chern–Simons 3-form.
In mathematics, the Chern theorem states that the Euler–Poincaré characteristic of a closed even-dimensional Riemannian manifold is equal to the integral of a certain polynomial of its curvature form.
In physics, Ginzburg–Landau theory, often called Landau–Ginzburg theory, named after Vitaly Ginzburg and Lev Landau, is a mathematical physical theory used to describe superconductivity. In its initial form, it was postulated as a phenomenological model which could describe type-I superconductors without examining their microscopic properties. One GL-type superconductor is the famous YBCO, and generally all cuprates.
In theoretical physics, the anti-de Sitter/conformal field theory correspondence is a conjectured relationship between two kinds of physical theories. On one side are anti-de Sitter spaces (AdS) that are used in theories of quantum gravity, formulated in terms of string theory or M-theory. On the other side of the correspondence are conformal field theories (CFT) that are quantum field theories, including theories similar to the Yang–Mills theories that describe elementary particles.
Bosonic string theory is the original version of string theory, developed in the late 1960s and named after Satyendra Nath Bose. It is so called because it contains only bosons in the spectrum.
Hagen Kleinert is professor of theoretical physics at the Free University of Berlin, Germany , Honorary Doctor at the West University of Timișoara, and at the Kyrgyz-Russian Slavic University in Bishkek. He is also Honorary Member of the Russian Academy of Creative Endeavors. For his contributions to particle and solid-state physics he was awarded the Max Born Prize 2008 with Medal. His contribution to the memorial volume celebrating the 100th birthday of Lev Davidovich Landau earned him the Majorana Prize 2008 with Medal. He is married to Dr. Annemarie Kleinert since 1974 with whom he has a son Michael Kleinert.
Alexander Markovich Polyakov is a Russian theoretical physicist, formerly at the Landau Institute in Moscow and, since 1989, at Princeton University, where he is the Joseph Henry Professor of Physics Emeritus.
In quantum field theory, a nonlinear σ model describes a scalar field Σ which takes on values in a nonlinear manifold called the target manifold T. The non-linear σ-model was introduced by Gell-Mann & Lévy, who named it after a field corresponding to a spinless meson called σ in their model. This article deals primarily with the quantization of the non-linear sigma model; please refer to the base article on the sigma model for general definitions and classical (non-quantum) formulations and results.
A conformal anomaly, scale anomaly, trace anomaly or Weyl anomaly is an anomaly, i.e. a quantum phenomenon that breaks the conformal symmetry of the classical theory.
Richard Melvin Schoen is an American mathematician known for his work in differential geometry and geometric analysis. He is best known for the resolution of the Yamabe problem in 1984.
Loop quantum cosmology (LQC) is a finite, symmetry-reduced model of loop quantum gravity (LQG) that predicts a "quantum bridge" between contracting and expanding cosmological branches.
The non-critical string theory describes the relativistic string without enforcing the critical dimension. Although this allows the construction of a string theory in 4 spacetime dimensions, such a theory usually does not describe a Lorentz invariant background. However, there are recent developments which make possible Lorentz invariant quantization of string theory in 4-dimensional Minkowski space-time.
The Geometry Festival is an annual mathematics conference held in the United States.
In the mathematical field of differential geometry, the Paneitz operator is a fourth-order differential operator defined on a Riemannian manifold of dimension n. It is named after Stephen Paneitz, who discovered it in 1983, and whose preprint was later published posthumously in Paneitz 2008. In fact, the same operator was found earlier in the context of conformal supergravity by E. Fradkin and A. Tseytlin in 1982 (Phys Lett B 110 117 and Nucl Phys B 1982 157 ). It is given by the formula
In physics, Liouville field theory is a two-dimensional conformal field theory whose classical equation of motion is a generalization of Liouville's equation.
The conformal bootstrap is a non-perturbative mathematical method to constrain and solve conformal field theories, i.e. models of particle physics or statistical physics that exhibit similar properties at different levels of resolution.
Giovanni Felder is a Swiss mathematical physicist and mathematician, working at ETH Zurich. He specializes in algebraic and geometric properties of integrable models of statistical mechanics and quantum field theory.
