I was born more than a thousand years ago. Put into a cryogenic tube at age seventeen, forgotten during a holocaust that decimated the world, I've finally been awakened to a more serene and peaceful future. But things at the hospital are new and strange. And it's starting to scare me. Everyone is young. Everyone is banded and tracked. And everyone is keeping secrets. The cute geneticist Michael Bennett might be the only good thing in this crazy new world where "life is precious" but no one seems free to live it. The problem is, I don't think he's being totally honest with me, either. When I'm told only I can save the human race from extinction, it's clear my freeze didn't avoid a dreadful fate. It only delayed the horror...
This is the English translation of Professor Voisin's book reflecting the discovery of the mirror symmetry phenomenon. The first chapter is devoted to the geometry of Calabi-Yau manifolds, and the second describes, as motivation, the ideas from quantum field theory that led to the discovery of mirror symmetry. The other chapters deal with more specialized aspects of the subject: the work of Candelas, de la Ossa, Greene, and Parkes, based on the fact that under the mirror symmetry hypothesis, the variation of Hodge structure of a Calabi-Yau threefold determines the Gromov-Witten invariants of its mirror; Batyrev's construction, which exhibits the mirror symmetry phenomenon between hypersurfaces of toric Fano varieties, after a combinatorial classification of the latter; the mathematical construction of the Gromov-Witten potential, and the proof of its crucial property (that it satisfies the WDVV equation), which makes it possible to construct a flat connection underlying a variation of Hodge structure in the Calabi-Yau case. The book concludes with the first "naive" Givental computation, which is a mysterious mathematical justification of the computation of Candelas, et al.
This volume presents surveys from a workshop held during the theme year in geometry and topology at the Centre de recherches mathematiques (CRM, University of Montreal, Canada). The volume is in some senses a sequel to Mirror Symmetry I (1998) and Mirror Symmetry II (1996), co-published by the AMS and International Press. It is intended for graduate students, research mathematicians and physicists working in mathematics and theoretical physics, especially in algebraic or complex geometry or conformal field theory
Mirror Symmetry has undergone dramatic progress since the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute (MSRI) workshop in 1991, whose proceedings constitute voluem I of this continuing collection. Tremendous insight has been gained on a number of key issues. This volume surveys these results. Some of the contributions in this work have appeared elsewhere, while others were written specifically for this collection. The areas covered are organized into 4 sections, and each presents papers by both physicists and mathematicians. This volume collects the most important developments that have taken place in mathematical physics since 1991. It is an essential reference tool for both mathematics and physics libraries and for students of physics and mathematics. Titles in this series are co-published, between the American Mathematical Society and International Press, Cambridge, MA, USA.
As K. Nomizu has justly noted [K. Nomizu, 56], Differential Geometry ever will be initiating newer and newer aspects of the theory of Lie groups. This monograph is devoted to just some such aspects of Lie groups and Lie algebras. New differential geometric problems came into being in connection with so called subsymmetric spaces, subsymmetries, and mirrors introduced in our works dating back to 1957 [L.V. Sabinin, 58a,59a,59b]. In addition, the exploration of mirrors and systems of mirrors is of interest in the case of symmetric spaces. Geometrically, the most rich in content there appeared to be the homogeneous Riemannian spaces with systems of mirrors generated by commuting subsymmetries, in particular, so called tri-symmetric spaces introduced in [L.V. Sabinin, 61b]. As to the concrete geometric problem which needs be solved and which is solved in this monograph, we indicate, for example, the problem of the classification of all tri-symmetric spaces with simple compact groups of motions. Passing from groups and subgroups connected with mirrors and subsymmetries to the corresponding Lie algebras and subalgebras leads to an important new concept of the involutive sum of Lie algebras [L.V. Sabinin, 65]. This concept is directly concerned with unitary symmetry of elementary par- cles (see [L.V. Sabinin, 95,85] and Appendix 1). The first examples of involutive (even iso-involutive) sums appeared in the - ploration of homogeneous Riemannian spaces with and axial symmetry. The consideration of spaces with mirrors [L.V. Sabinin, 59b] again led to iso-involutive sums.
The relationship between Tropical Geometry and Mirror Symmetry goes back to the work of Kontsevich and Y. Soibelman (2000), who applied methods of non-archimedean geometry (in particular, tropical curves) to Homological Mirror Symmetry. In combination with the subsequent work of Mikhalkin on the “tropical” approach to Gromov-Witten theory and the work of Gross and Siebert, Tropical Geometry has now become a powerful tool. Homological Mirror Symmetry is the area of mathematics concentrated around several categorical equivalences connecting symplectic and holomorphic (or algebraic) geometry. The central ideas first appeared in the work of Maxim Kontsevich (1993). Roughly speaking, the subject can be approached in two ways: either one uses Lagrangian torus fibrations of Calabi-Yau manifolds (the so-called Strominger-Yau-Zaslow picture, further developed by Kontsevich and Soibelman) or one uses Lefschetz fibrations of symplectic manifolds (suggested by Kontsevich and further developed by Seidel). Tropical Geometry studies piecewise-linear objects which appear as “degenerations” of the corresponding algebro-geometric objects.
