Based on lectures held at the 7th Villa de Leyva summer school, this book presents an introduction to topics of current interest in the interface of geometry, topology and physics. It is aimed at graduate students in physics or mathematics with interests in geometric, algebraic as well as topological methods and their applications to quantum field theory.This volume contains the written notes corresponding to lectures given by experts in the field. They cover current topics of research in ...

This monograph presents various ongoing approaches to the vast topic of quantization, which is the process of forming a quantum mechanical system starting from a classical one, and discusses their numerous fruitful interactions with mathematics.The opening chapter introduces the various forms of quantization and their interactions with each other and with mathematics.A first approach to quantization, called deformation quantization, consists of viewing the Planck constant a...

The first of two volumes offering a modern introduction to Kaehlerian geometry and Hodge structure. The book starts with basic material on complex variables, complex manifolds, holomorphic vector bundles, sheaves and cohomology theory, the latter being treated in a more theoretical way than is usual in geometry. The author then proves the Kaehler identities, which leads to the hard Lefschetz theorem and the Hodge index theorem. The book culminates with the Hodge decomposition theorem. The ...

Mathematics is not, and never will be, an empirical science, but mathematicians are finding that the use of computers and specialized software allows the generation of mathematical insight in the form of conjectures and examples, which pave the way for theorems and their proofs. In this way, the experimental approach to pure mathematics is revolutionizing the way research mathematicians work. As the first of its kind, this book provides material for a one-semester course in experimental ma...

String Theory comprises two volumes which give a comprehensive and pedagogic account of the subject. Volume 1, first published in 1998, provides a thorough introduction to the bosonic string. The first four chapters introduce the central ideas of string theory, the tools of conformal field theory and of the Polyakov path integral, and the covariant quantization of the string. The next three chapters treat string interactions: the general formalism, and detailed treatments of the tree level...

The 2003 second volume of this account of Kaehlerian geometry and Hodge theory starts with the topology of families of algebraic varieties. Proofs of the Lefschetz theorem on hyperplane sections, the Picard–Lefschetz study of Lefschetz pencils, and Deligne theorems on the degeneration of the Leray spectral sequence and the global invariant cycles follow. The main results of the second part are the generalized Noether–Lefschetz theorems, the generic triviality of the Abel–Jacobi maps, and m...

The book is devoted to the study of the geometrical and topological structure of gauge theories. It consists of the following three building blocks:- Geometry and topology of fibre bundles,- Clifford algebras, spin structures and Dirac operators,- Gauge theory.Written in the style of a mathematical textbook, it combines a comprehensive presentation of the mathematical foundations with a discussion of a variety of advanced topics in gauge theory.The f...

These lecture notes provide a systematic introduction to matrix models of quantum field theories with non-commutative and fuzzy geometries.The book initially focuses on the matrix formulation of non-commutative and fuzzy spaces, followed by a description of the non-perturbative treatment of the corresponding field theories. As an example, the phase structure of non-commutative phi-four theory is treated in great detail, with a separate chapter on the multitrace approach. The last c...

The first part of this book provides an elementary and self-contained exposition of classical Galois theory and its applications to questions of solvability of algebraic equations in explicit form. The second part describes a surprising analogy between the fundamental theorem of Galois theory and the classification of coverings over a topological space. The third part contains a geometric description of finite algebraic extensions of the field of meromorphic functions on a Riemann surface ...

The topics of this book are the mathematical foundations of non-relativistic quantum mechanics and the mathematical theory they require. The main characteristic of the book is that the mathematics is developed assuming familiarity with elementary analysis only. Moreover, all the proofs are carried out in detail. These features make the book easily accessible to readers with only the mathematical training offered by undergraduate education in mathematics or in physics, and also ideal for in...

A First Course in Computational Algebraic Geometry is designed for young students with some background in algebra who wish to perform their first experiments in computational geometry. Originating from a course taught at the African Institute for Mathematical Sciences, the book gives a compact presentation of the basic theory, with particular emphasis on explicit computational examples using the freely available computer algebra system, Singular. Readers will quickly gain the confidence to...

This volume presents modern trends in the area of symmetries and their applications based on contributions from the workshop "Lie Theory and Its Applications in Physics", held near Varna, Bulgaria, in June 2015. Traditionally, Lie theory is a tool to build mathematical models for physical systems.Recently, the trend has been towards geometrization of the mathematical description of physical systems and objects. A geometric approach to a system yields in general some notion of symme...