Kirjahaku

A New York Times Science BestsellerWhat if you had to take an art class in which you were only taught how to paint a fence? What if you were never shown the paintings of van Gogh and Picasso, weren't even told they existed? Alas, this is how math is taught, and so for most of us it becomes the intellectual equivalent of watching paint dry.In Love and Math , renowned mathematician Edward Frenkel reveals a side of math we've never seen, suffused with all the beauty and elegance of a work of art. In this heartfelt and passionate book, Frenkel shows that mathematics, far from occupying a specialist niche, goes to the heart of all matter, uniting us across cultures, time, and space. Love and Math tells two intertwined stories: of the wonders of mathematics and of one young man's journey learning and living it. Having braved a discriminatory educational system to become one of the twenty-first century's leading mathematicians, Frenkel now works on one of the biggest ideas to come out of math in the last 50 years: the Langlands Program. Considered by many to be a Grand Unified Theory of mathematics, the Langlands Program enables researchers to translate findings from one field to another so that they can solve problems, such as Fermat's last theorem, that had seemed intractable before.At its core, Love and Math is a story about accessing a new way of thinking, which can enrich our lives and empower us to better understand the world and our place in it. It is an invitation to discover the magic hidden universe of mathematics.

The Langlands Program was conceived initially as a bridge between Number Theory and Automorphic Representations, and has now expanded into such areas as Geometry and Quantum Field Theory, tying together seemingly unrelated disciplines into a web of tantalizing conjectures. A new chapter to this grand project is provided in this book. It develops the geometric Langlands Correspondence for Loop Groups, a new approach, from a unique perspective offered by affine Kac-Moody algebras. The theory offers fresh insights into the world of Langlands dualities, with many applications to Representation Theory of Infinite-dimensional Algebras, and Quantum Field Theory. This accessible text builds the theory from scratch, with all necessary concepts defined and the essential results proved along the way. Based on courses taught at Berkeley, the book provides many open problems which could form the basis for future research, and is accessible to advanced undergraduate students and beginning graduate students.