The n-Category Café

String-Math 2011

Posted by Urs Schreiber

Eric Sharpe asks me to announce the following, which I gladly do:

There is planned a new conference series meant to be anlogous to the standard annual string theory meetings but concentrating on mathematical/structural aspects of string theory. The inaugural meeting of this series is

• String-Math 2011

  UPenn, Philadelphia,

  June 6-11, 2011

  conference website

Here is the description from the conference website, equipped with $n$Lab links, for your convenience:

For mathematics, string theory has been a source of many significant inspirations, ranging from Seiberg-Witten theory in four-manifolds, to enumerative geometry and Gromov-Witten theory in algebraic geometry, to work on the Jones polynomial in knot theory, to recent progress in the geometric Langlands program and the development of derived algebraic geometry and $n$-category theory. In the other direction, mathematics has provided physicists with powerful tools, ranging from powerful differential geometric techniques for solving or analyzing key partial differential equations, to toric geometry, to K-theory and derived categories in D-branes, to the analysis of Calabi-Yau manifolds and string compactifications, to the use of modular forms and other arithmetic techniques.

This is the first conference in a series of large meetings bringing together mathematicians and physicists who work on ideas related to string theory. String theory, as well as quantum field theory, have contributed a series of profound ideas which gave rise to entirely new mathematical fields and revitalized older ones. The conference aims to engage the large and rapidly growing number of mathematicians and physicists working at the string-theoretic interface between the two academic fields and to facilitate the flow of ideas with mathematical techniques and ideas contributing crucially to major advances in string theory.

Topics to be covered include but are not limited to

• Homological mirror symmetry
• Categorical constructions of topological field theories
• Mathematical string phenomenology
• F-theory
• Wall crossing formulas
• Geometric Langlands
• Arithmetic of strings
• Gromov-Witten theory and related enumerative geometry
• A-twisted Landau-Ginzburg models
• String topology
• Elliptic cohomology
• Heterotic mirror symmetry
• Topological T duality
• String measures
• Chiral de Rham complexes
• Noncommutative geometry