Related papers: Christiaan Huygens and contact geometry
Notes of an introductory course given at the conference "Torsors: Theory and Applications" in Edinburgh, January 2011.
These notes are loosely based on lectures given at the CERN Winter School on Supergravity, Strings and Gauge theories, February 2009 and at the IPM String School in Tehran, April 2009. I have focused on a few concrete topics and also on…
This paper shows how beginning with Justus Grassmann's work, Hermann Grassmann was influenced in his mathematical thinking by crystallography. H. Grassmann's Ausdehnungslehre in turn had a decisive influence on W.K. Clifford in the genesis…
These are introductory lecture notes on complex geometry, Calabi-Yau manifolds and toric geometry. We first define basic concepts of complex and Kahler geometry. We then proceed with an analysis of various definitions of Calabi-Yau…
This article is a survey of recent developments in, and a tutorial on, the approach to P v. NP and related questions called Geometric Complexity Theory (GCT). It is written to be accessible to graduate students. Numerous open questions in…
The Dutch scientist Christiaan Huygens refined Archimedes' celebrated geometrical computation of $\pi$ to its highest point. Yet the rich content of his beautiful treatise \emph{De circuli magnitudine inventa} (1654) has apparently never…
These notes represent a much expanded and updated version of the \textquotedblleft mini course\textquotedblright that the author gave at the ETH (Z\"{u}rich) and the University of Z\"{u}rich in February of 1995. The purpose of these notes…
These notes are intended to be an introduction to shifted symplectic geometry, targeted to Poisson geometers with a serious background in homological algebra. They are extracted from a mini-course given by the first author at the Poisson…
The goal of these notes is to give a short introduction to Fukaya categories and some of their applications. The first half of the text is devoted to a brief review of Lagrangian Floer (co)homology and product structures. Then we introduce…
This text is a slightly edited version of lecture notes for a course I gave at ETH, during the Winter term 2000-2001, to undergraduate Mathematics and Physics students. Contents: Chapter 1 - Examples of Dynamical Systems Chapter 2 -…
This paper is extracted from an opening address given at the workshop "Wetting: from microscopic origins to industrial applications" (Giens, May 6-12, 2000). It discusses two special points a) the nature of line energies for a contact line…
This is the text of the lecture given by the author in Naples at "Giornata IndAM", June 7, 2005. The lecture is addressed at the general mathematical audience and reviews several topics in deformation theory of associative algebras.
The present notes are based on a course on Cherednik algebras given by the first author at MIT in the Fall of 2009. Their goal is to give an introduction to Cherednik algebras, and to review the web of connections between them and other…
This article is based on the opening lecture at the third quantum geometry and quantum gravity school sponsored by the European Science Foundation and held at Zakopane, Poland in March 2011. The goal of the lecture was to present a broad…
This is a survey of knot contact homology, with an emphasis on topological, algebraic, and combinatorial aspects.
In offered work short historical excursus to the classical theory of light is presented: Grimaldi, Fermat, Newton, Huygens, Young, Fresnel, Fraunhofer, and Gauss. The ray analog of wave model of light and Huygens-Fresnel's elementary waves…
These notes are a record of lectures given in the Workshop on Connections Between Algebra and Geometry at the University of Regina, May 29--June 1, 2012. The lectures were meant as an introduction to current research problems related to fat…
These notes reproduce the content of a short, 50-minutes, survey talk given at the Nice University in September, 2004. We added a few topics that have not been touched on in the lecture by lack of time.
This introductory text arises from a lecture given in G\"oteborg, Sweden, given by the first author and is intended for undergraduate students, as well as for any mathematically inclined reader wishing to explore a synthesis of ideas…
These notes originated in a series of lectures I gave in Marseille in May, 2013. I was invited to give an introduction to the isomorphism theorems, originating with Dynkin, which connect Markov local times and Gaussian processes. This is an…