Mark Gross – författare

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.

Research in string theory has generated a rich interaction with algebraic geometry, with exciting new work that includes the Strominger-Yau-Zaslow conjecture. This monograph builds on lectures at the 2002 Clay School on Geometry and String Theory that sought to bridge the gap between the languages of string theory and algebraic geometry, presenting an updated discussion that includes subsequent developments. The group of distinguished mathematicians and mathematical physicists who produced this monograph worked as a team to create a unique volume. Its overall goal is to explore the physical and mathematical aspects of Dirichlet branes. The narrative is organized around two principal ideas: Kontsevich's Homological Mirror, Symmetry conjecture, and the Strominger-Yau-Zaslow conjecture. The authors explain how Kontsevich's conjecture is equivalent to the identification of two different categories of Dirichlet branes. They also explore the ramifications and current state of the Strominger-Yau-Zaslow conjecture. They relate the ideas to active areas of research that include the McKay correspondence, topological quantum field theory, and stability structures. The authors were not satisfied to tell their story twice, from separate mathematics and physics points of view. Instead, theirs is a unified presentation offered in a way that both mathematicians and physicists can follow, without having all of the foundations of both subjects at their immediate disposal.

Tropical geometry provides an explanation for the remarkable power of mirror symmetry to connect complex and symplectic geometry. The main theme of this book is the interplay between tropical geometry and mirror symmetry, culminating in a description of the recent work of Gross and Siebert using log geometry to understand how the tropical world relates the A- and B-models in mirror symmetry. The text starts with a detailed introduction to the notions of tropical curves and manifolds, and then gives a thorough description of both sides of mirror symmetry for projective space, bringing together material which so far can only be found scattered throughout the literature. Next follows an introduction to the log geometry of Fontaine-Illusie and Kato, as needed for Nishinou and Siebert's proof of Mikhalkin's tropical curve counting formulas. This latter proof is given in the fourth chapter. The fifth chapter considers the mirror, B-model side, giving recent results of the author showing how tropical geometry can be used to evaluate the oscillatory integrals appearing. The final chapter surveys reconstruction results of the author and Siebert for "integral tropical manifolds." A complete version of the argument is given in two dimensions. A co-publication of the AMS and CBMS.

This is an introduction to a very active field of research, on the boundary between mathematics and physics. It is aimed at graduate students and researchers in geometry and string theory. Proofs or sketches are given for many important results. From the reviews: "An excellent introduction to current research in the geometry of Calabi-Yau manifolds, hyper-Kahler manifolds, exceptional holonomy and mirror symmetry...This is an excellent and useful book." --MATHEMATICAL REVIEWS