Jerome Gauntlett - Böcker

This volume is the proceedings of the 2002 Clay Mathematics Institute School on Geometry and String Theory. This month-long program was held at the Isaac Newton Institute for Mathematical Sciences in Cambridge, England, and was organized by both mathematicians and physicists: A Corti, R. Dijkgraaf, M. Douglas, J. Gauntlett, M. Gross, C. Hull, A. Jaffe and M. Reid. The early part of the school had many lectures that introduced various concepts of algebraic geometry and string theory with a focus on improving communication between these two fields. During the latter part of the program there were also a number of research level talks.This volume contains a selection of expository and research articles by lecturers at the school and highlights some of the current interests of researchers working at the interface between string theory and algebraic geometry. The topics covered include manifolds of special holonomy, supergravity, supersymmetry, D-branes, the McKay correspondence and the Fourier-Mukai transform. The book is suitable for graduate students and research mathematicians interested in relations between mathematical physics and algebraic geometry.

Tom Kibble is an inspirational theoretical physicist who has made profound contributions to our understanding of the physical world. To celebrate his 80th birthday a one-day symposium was held on March 13, 2013 at the Blackett Laboratory, Imperial College, London. This important volume is a compilation of papers based on the presentations that were given at the symposium.The symposium profiled various aspects of Tom's long scientific career. The tenor of the meeting was set in the first talk given by Neil Turok, director of the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, who described Tom as “our guru and example”. He gave a modern overview of cosmological theories, including a discussion of Tom's pioneering work on how topological defects might have formed in the early universe during symmetry-breaking phase transitions. Wojciech Zurek of Los Alamos National Laboratory continued with this theme, surveying analogous processes within the context of condensed matter systems and explaining the Kibble-Zurek scaling phenomenon. The day's events were concluded by Jim Virdee of Imperial College, who summarized the epic and successful quest of finding the Higgs boson at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. At the end of the talk, there was a standing ovation for Tom that lasted several minutes.In the evening, Steven Weinberg gave a keynote presentation to a capacity audience of 700 people. He talked eruditely on symmetry breaking and its role in elementary particle physics. At the banquet dinner, Frank Close of Oxford University concluded the banquet speeches by summarizing the significance of Tom's contributions to the creation of the Standard Model.