Topology and quantum theory in interaction : NSF-CBMS Regional Conference in the Mathematical Sciences, Topological and Geometric Methods in QFT, July 31-August 4, 2017, Montana State University, Bozeman, Montana / / David Ayala, Daniel S. Freed, Ryan E. Grady, editors

• Record Nr.: UNINA9910793296903321
• Pubbl/distr/stampa: [Place of publication not identified] : , : American Mathematical Society, , [2018]; ©2018
• ISBN: 1-4704-4941-2
• Descrizione fisica: 1 online resource (274 pages)
• Collana: Contemporary mathematics, ; 718 , 0271-4132
• Disciplina: 530.143
• Soggetti: Quantum field theory - Mathematics
• Lingua di pubblicazione: Inglese
• Formato: Materiale a stampa
• Livello bibliografico: Monografia
• Nota di bibliografia: Includes bibliographical references.
• Nota di contenuto: Geometry and physics: an overview / David R. Morrison -- An introduction to spin systems for mathematicians / Ingmar Saberi -- The Arf-Brown TQFT of pin⁻ surfaces / Arun Debray and Sam Gunningham -- A guide for computing stable homotopy groups / Agnes Beaudry and Jonathan A. Campbell -- Flagged higher categories / David Ayala and John Francis -- How to derive Feynman diagrams for nite-dimensional integrals directly from the BV formalism / Owen Gwilliam and Theo Johnson-Freyd -- Homotopy RG flow and the non-linear -model / Ryan E. Grady and Brian Williams -- The holomorphic bosonic string / Owen Gwilliam and Brian Williams.
• Sommario/riassunto: This volume contains the proceedings of the NSF-CBMS Regional Conference on Topological and Geometric Methods in QFT, held from July 31-August 4, 2017, at Montana State University in Bozeman, Montana. In recent decades, there has been a movement to axiomatize quantum field theory into a mathematical structure. In a different direction, one can ask to test these axiom systems against physics. Can they be used to rederive known facts about quantum theories or, better yet, be the framework in which to solve open problems? Recently, Freed and Hopkins have provided a solution to a classification problem in ; condensed matter theory, which is ultimately based on the field theory axioms of Graeme Segal. Papers contained in this volume amplify various aspects of the Freed-Hopkins program, develop some category theory, which lies behind the cobordism hypothesis, the major structure theorem for topological field theories, and relate to Costello's approach to perturbative quantum field theory. Two papers on the latter use this framework to recover fundamental results about some physical theories: two-dimensional sigma-models and the bosonic string. Perhaps it is surprising that such sparse axiom systems encode enough structure to prove important results in physics. These successes can be taken as encouragement that the axiom systems are at least on the right track toward articulating what a quantum field theory is.

Fictions of state : culture and credit in Britain, 1694-1994 / / Patrick Brantlinger

• Record Nr.: UNINA9910793770803321
• Autore: Brantlinger Patrick <1941->
• Pubbl/distr/stampa: Ithaca, New York ; ; London : , : Cornell University Press, , [1996]; ©1996
• ISBN: 1-5017-1180-6; 1-5017-1179-2
• Descrizione fisica: 1 online resource (xii, 291 pages) : illustrations
• Disciplina: 823.009
• Soggetti: English fiction - History and criticism; Great Britain Economic conditions
• Lingua di pubblicazione: Inglese
• Formato: Materiale a stampa
• Livello bibliografico: Monografia
• Note generali: Includes index.
• Nota di bibliografia: Includes bibliographical references (p. 265-282) and index.
• Nota di contenuto: Front matter -- Contents -- Illustrations -- Acknowledgments / Brantlinger, Patrick -- 1. Debt, Fetishism, and Empire: A Postmodem Preamble -- 2. The Assets of Lilliput (1694-1763) -- 3. Upon Daedalian Wings (1750-1832) -- 4. Banking on Novels (1800-1914 -- 5. Consuming Modernisms, Phallic Mothers (1900-1945) -- 6. Postindustrial, Postcolonial, Postmodem: "Anarchy in the U.K" (1945-; 1994) -- Works Cited -- Index
• Sommario/riassunto: In this ambitious book, Patrick Brantlinger offers a cultural history of Great Britain focused on the concept of "public credit," from the 1694 founding of the Bank of England to the present. He draws on literary texts ranging from Augustan satire such as Gulliver's Travels to postmodern satire such as Martin Amis's Money: A Suicide Note. All critique the misrecognition of public credit as wealth. The economic foundations of modern nation-states involved national debt, public credit, and paper money. Brantlinger traces the emergence of modern, imperial Great Britain from those foundations. He analyzes the process whereby nationalism, both the cause and the result of wars and imperial expansion, multiplied national debt and produced crises of public credit resolved only through more nationalism and war. During the first half of the eighteenth century, conservatives attacked public credit as fetishistic and characterized national debt as alchemical. From the 1850's, the stabilizing theories of public credit authored by David Hume, Adam Smith, Henry Thornton, and others, helped initiate the first "social science" economics. In the nineteenth century, literary criticism both paralleled and questioned early capitalist discourse on public credit and nationalism, while the Victorian novel refigured debt as the individual, private credit and debt. During the era of high modernism and Keynesian economics, the notion of high culture as genuine value recast the debate over money and national indebtedness. Brantlinger relates this cultural-historical trajectory to Marxist, poststructuralist, and postcolonial theories about the decline of the European empires after World War II, the global debt crisis, and the weakening of western nation-states in the postmodern era.