Charles Doran - Böcker

The editors would like to thank the Donner Foundation, the Draeger Foundation, and the Government of Canada for their timely and generous support of this study. The study was initiated by the editors as part of the research program of the Center of Canadian Studies at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies, The Johns Hopkins University, Washington, D.C., and the emerging affiliated program in North American Studies. Particular appreciation goes to Dr. Barbara G. Doran for the final editing of the entire manuscript. In addition to the individuals acknowledged in each of the chapters, the editors thank those scholars who helped guide the project at various times with constructive criticism and discussion: Tom Barnes, Robert Bothwell, Reuven Brenner, David Calleo, Colin Campbell, Benjamin Ginsberg, Judith Goldstein, Peter Katzenstein, Allan Kornberg, Jonathan Lemco, Seymour Martin Lipset, Charles Lipson, Charles Pearson, Richard Rosecrance, and Sidney Weintraub.

The NAFTA Puzzle: Political Parties and Trade in North America explores the political background of trade liberalization culminating in the signing of the historic North American agreement more than a decade after the North America Accord idea had been outright rejected. Experts from Canada, the U.S., and Mexico examine how each political party grappled with trade as the constituent base, interest group pressures, and ideologies shifted over broad time periods. The book treats each of Canada's long-standing national parties, the Republican and Democratic parties in the U.S., and Mexico's PRI historically, concluding that North America's principal parties have flip-flopped on the trade liberalization issue. The NAFTA Puzzle details the congressional vote in the U.S. and brings us all the way up to the Zapatista uprising in Mexico, ending with a discussion of the significance of NAFTA for overall trade liberalization and the future of trade and commercial relations on the continent.

The conference String-Math 2014 was held from June 9-13, 2014, at the University of Alberta. This edition of String-Math is the first to include satellite workshops: ``String-Math Summer School'' (held from June 2-6, 2014, at the University of British Columbia), ``Calabi-Yau Manifolds and their Moduli'' (held from June 14-18, 2014, at the University of Alberta), and ``Quantum Curves and Quantum Knot Invariants'' (held from June 16-20, 2014, at the Banff International Research Station). This volume presents the proceedings of the conference and satellite workshops.For mathematics, string theory has been a source of many significant inspirations, ranging from Seiberg-Witten theory in four-manifolds, to enumerative geometry and Gromov-Witten theory in algebraic geometry, to work on the Jones polynomial in knot theory, to recent progress in the geometric Langlands program and the development of derived algebraic geometry and n-category theory. In the other direction, mathematics has provided physicists with powerful tools, ranging from powerful differential geometric techniques for solving or analyzing key partial differential equations, to toric geometry, to K-theory and derived categories in D-branes, to the analysis of Calabi-Yau manifolds and string compactifications, to modular forms and other arithmetic techniques. Articles in this book address many of these topics.

This book consists of a series of introductory lectures on mirror symmetry and its surrounding topics. These lectures were provided by participants in the PIMS Superschool for Derived Categories and D-branes in July 2016. Together, they form a comprehensive introduction to the field that integrates perspectives from mathematicians and physicists alike. These proceedings provide a pleasant and broad introduction into modern research topics surrounding string theory and mirror symmetry that is approachable to readers new to the subjects. These topics include constructions of various mirror pairs, approaches to mirror symmetry, connections to homological algebra, and physical motivations. Of particular interest is the connection between GLSMs, D-branes, birational geometry, and derived categories, which is explained both from a physical and mathematical perspective. The introductory lectures provided herein highlight many features of this emerging field and give concrete connections between the physics and the math.Mathematical readers will come away with a broader perspective on this field and a bit of physical intuition, while physicists will gain an introductory overview of the developing mathematical realization of physical predictions.