A five-day conference celebrating the legacy of Raoul Bott was held at the CRM on June 9-13, 2008. The conference focused on the extraordinary impact Bott had on both topology and interactions between mathematics, physics and technology. The conference was co-organized by the Clay Mathematics Institute and had support from the National Science Foundation (Award 0805925). Montreal was a natural venue for such an event since Raoul Bott obtained two degrees in electrical engineering at McGill University in the 1940s and an honorary doctorate from McGill in 1987. The fact that Bott's presence is still fresh in the minds of all those involved made for a tremendous amount of enthusiasm and every attempt has been made to channel this energy into this book. The contributions to this book come from three generations of Bott's students, coauthors, and fellow kindred spirits in order to cover six decades of Bott's research, identify his enduring mathematical legacy and the consequences for emerging fields. The contributions can be read independently. In order to help a whole to emerge from the parts, the book is broken into four sections and to make the book accessible to a wide audience, each section starts with easier-to-read reminiscences and works its way into more involved papers. Titles in this series are co-published with the Centre de Recherches Mathématiques.
Author(s): P. Robert Kotiuga
Series: CRM Proceedings and Lecture Notes 50
Publisher: American Mathematical Society
Year: 2010
Language: English
Commentary: decrypted from 2208D529806FAC639815D30D67745F2C source file
Pages: 403
Cover
Title page
Contents
Preface
Dedication
Invention
Introduction
Montréal, the 1940s, and mathematical prehistory
My parents’ Montréal years and growing up with Raoul as my father
Raoul Bott, McGill, the 1940s
Iron rings, Doctor Honoris Causa Raoul Bott, Carl Herz, and a hidden hand
The Bott–Duffin synthesis of electrical circuits
Early students and colleagues
Raoul Bott as we knew him
Working with Raoul Bott: From geometry to physics
The algorithmic side of Riemann’s mathematics
Actions of Lie groups and Lie algebras on manifolds
PDE from the point of view of multiplier ideals
Dirac operator and ?-theory for discrete groups
The Lefschetz principle, fixed point theory, and index theory
A new look at the theory of levels
On the space of morphisms between Étale groupoids
Localization, equivariance and outgrowths of Morse theory and periodicity
Raoul Bott as we knew him
Loop products on connected sums of projective spaces
Equivariant cohomology and reflections
Connectedness of level sets of the moment map for torus actions on the based loop group
Computing characteristic numbers using fixed points
From minimal geodesics to supersymmetric field theories
Dualities and interactions with quantum field theory
Raoul Bott as my math teacher
A physics colloquium at McGill that changed my life
Geometric Langlands from six dimensions
Duality and equivalence of module categories in noncommutative geometry
Generalized complex geometry and T-duality
Topological quantum field theories from compact Lie groups
Back Cover
