Bøger af Sergio Cecotti

This textbook is based on the author's lecture notes held at Qiuzhen College, Tsinghua University, Beijing, renowned for its rapid scientific growth of its excellent students. The book offers a remarkable combination of characteristics that are both exceptional and seemingly contradictory. It is designed to be entirely self-contained, starting from the basics and building a strong foundation in geometric and algebraic tools. Simultaneously, topics are infused with mathematical elegance and profundity, employing contemporary language and techniques. From a physicist's perspective, the content delves deeply into the physical aspects, emphasizing the underlying principles. This book bridges the gap between students and cutting-edge research, with a special focus on symplectic geometry, integrability, and recent developments in the field. It is designed to engage and captivate the reader. A conscious selection of topics ensures a more relevant and contemporary approach compared to traditional textbooks. The book addresses common misconceptions, offering clarity and precision. In its quest for brevity, this book is tailored for a one-semester course, offering a comprehensive and concise resource. The author's dedication is evident throughout this volume, encapsulating these goals within roughly 300 pages.

Graduate students typically enter into courses on string theory having little to no familiarity with the mathematical background so crucial to the discipline. As such, this book, based on lecture notes, edited and expanded, from the graduate course taught by the author at SISSA and BIMSA, places particular emphasis on said mathematical background. The target audience for the book includes students of both theoretical physics and mathematics. This explains the book¿s "strange" style: on the one hand, it is highly didactic and explicit, with a host of examples for the physicists, but, in addition, there are also almost 100 separate technical boxes, appendices, and starred sections, in which matters discussed in the main text are put into a broader mathematical perspective, while deeper and more rigorous points of view (particularly those from the modern era) are presented. The boxes also serve to further shore up the reader¿s understanding of the underlying math. In writing this book, the author¿s goal was not to achieve any sort of definitive conciseness, opting instead for clarity and "completeness". To this end, several arguments are presented more than once from different viewpoints and in varying contexts.