Conference: Geometry and Topology of String Theory

Northwestern University, Evanston, IL

May 23-27, 2004
 

Sponsored by Northwestern University and the NSF

During the 2003-2004 academic year, the Department of Mathematics of Northwestern University is hosting a special year in the geometry and topology of string theory. As a culmination of this activity, we have organized a conference bringing together mathematicians and physicists working in different areas related to string theory.

The conference will be held on the campus of Northwestern University in Evanston from Sunday, May 23 till Thursday, May 27. We are providing travel and accommodation support to junior participants. Senior participants are also welcome to apply for support, but priority will be given to junior participants and workshop attendees. For this reason, we encourage people to register their intention to attend, to enable us to better estimate our levels of support.

We have reserved blocks of rooms for people attending the conference, at two hotels.

From O'Hare Airport, take a 303 taxi to get to Evanston, not a Chicago taxi. There is a flat rate of $23+tip (those receiving reimbursement remember to obtain a receipt).

The previously advertised information below is incorrect. On Saturday, your key will be held by Joseph Marshak, whose cell phone number is (847) 269-7771. On Sunday, your key will be held by Ezra Getzler, whose cell phone number is (773) 96-4947.

For those who are arriving outside office hours and staying at Garrett, please contact the security officer Thomas John on his cell phone (847) 644-9012 to obtain your room key.

Metromix has lots of information on restaurants, bars and other good stuff in the Chicago area, including Evanston. (Downtown Chicago is about 50 minutes away by public transport, but the North Side of Chicago is a lot closer.)

Program of Conference

There will be a mini-conference on noncommutative geometry and mirror symmetry held following the conference, on the afternoon of Friday, May 28. The speakers are

Dmitry Arinkin (U of Chicago) Families of non-commutative Lagrangian tori over a commutative base
Vadim Vologodsky (U of Chicago) Integrality of the canonical coordinates on the moduli space of Calabi-Yau varieties

Speakers

Mina Aganagic (Washington) Topological strings and integrable hierarchies
Alexander Braverman (Harvard/Brown) Geometric construction of quantum group actions, quantum K-theory and instanton counting
Tom Bridgeland (Edinburgh)
Tom Coates (Harvard) Quantum extraordinary cohomology
Emanuel Diaconescu (Rutgers) Extremal transitions in Gromov-Witten theory
Kenji Fukaya (Kyoto) Structure of generating function of holomorphic disks bounding a special Lagrangian submanifold in Calabi-Yau 3 fold
Sergei Gukov (Harvard) Perturbative Yang-Mills theory and moduli spaces of curves
Kentaro Hori (Toronto)
Anton Kapustin (CalTech) Remarks on topological Landau-Ginzburg models
Albrecht Klemm (Wisconsin) The topological string on a compact Calabi-Yau and string duality
Chiu-Chu Melissa Liu (Harvard) A mathematical theory of the topological vertex
Marcos Marino (CERN) Chern-Simons theory and the topological vertex
Nikita Nekrasov (IHES)
Yong-Geun Oh (Wisconsin) Obstruction cycles and Landau-Ginzburg potentials: the Fano toric case
Rahul Pandharipande (Princeton) Hodge integrals, rubber integrals, and the quantum cohomology of the Hilbert scheme of points
Alexander Polishchuk (Oregon) Quasicoherent sheaves on complex noncommutative 2-tori
Paul Seidel (Chicago)
Richard Thomas (Imperial College)
 

In the week before the conference, we are holding a workshop for graduate students. Everyone is of course welcome to attend.

The organizers may be contacted by email at
getzler at math.northwestern.edu and
zaslow at math.northwestern.edu.