This memorial volume is dedicated to physicist Gerald E Brown (1926-2013) or 'Gerry' as he was known to his many students, postdocs, colleagues and friends. As written by one of the contributors to this book, 'Gerry was an inspiring father figure for generations of theoretical nuclear physicists and a great human being'.This book covers a wide range of topics in nuclear physics, including nuclear structure, two- and three-body nuclear forces, strangeness nuclear physics, chiral symmetry, hadrons in dense medium, hidden local symmetry, heavy quark symmetry, cosmic neutrinos, nuclear double-beta decay, neutron stars, gravitational waves, renormalization group methods, exotic nuclei, electron ion collider (EIC), and much more. Most of the authors are Gerry's former students and collaborators.We hope readers will find this book very interesting not only for its physics content but also for the window it gives into Gerry's personal legacy and humanity. This book has vivid recollections of Gerry at Stony Brook, Princeton and Copenhagen, together with his humor and his very special intuitive way of thinking.

This book presents, in the form of reviews by world's leading physicists in wide-ranging fields in theoretical physics, the influence and prescience of Skyrme's daring idea of 1960, originally conceived for nuclear physics, that fermions can arise from bosons via topological solitons, pervasively playing a powerful role in wide-ranging areas of physics, from nuclear/astrophysics, to particle physics, to string theory and to condensed matter physics.The skyrmion description, both from gauge theory and from gauge/gravity duality, offers solutions to some long-standing and extremely difficult problems at high baryonic density, inaccessible by QCD proper. It also offers explanations and makes startling predictions for fascinating new phenomena in condensed matter systems. In both cases, what is at the core is the topology although the phenomena are drastically different, even involving different spacetime dimensions.This second edition has been expanded with addition of new reviews and extensively updated to take into account the latest developments in the field.