This volume is a tribute to Maxim Kontsevich, one of the most original and influential mathematicians of our time. Maxim's vision has inspired major developments in many areas of mathematics, ranging all the way from probability theory to motives over finite fields, and has brought forth a paradigm shift at the interface of modern geometry and mathematical physics. Many of his papers have opened completely new directions of research and led to the solutions of many classical problems. This book collects papers by leading experts currently engaged in research on topics close to Maxim's heart. Contributors: S. Donaldson A. Goncharov D. Kaledin M. Kapranov A. Kapustin L. Katzarkov A. Noll P. Pandit S. Pimenov J. Ren P. Seidel C. Simpson Y. Soibelman R. Thorngren

This book contains exclusively invited contributions from collaborators of Maximilian Kreuzer, giving accounts of his scientific legacy and original articles from renowned theoretical physicists and mathematicians, including Victor Batyrev, Philip Candelas, Michael Douglas, Alexei Morozov, Joseph Polchinski, Peter van Nieuwenhuizen, and Peter West.Besides a collection of review and research articles from high-profile researchers in string theory and related fields of mathematics (in particular, algebraic geometry) which discuss recent progress in the exploration of string theory vacua and corresponding mathematical developments, this book contains a pedagogical account of the important work of Brandt, Dragon, and Kreuzer on classification of anomalies in gauge theories. This highly cited work, which is also quoted in the textbook of Steven Weinberg on quantum field theory, has not yet been presented in full detail except in private lecture notes by Norbert Dragon.Similarly, the software package PALP (Package for Analyzing Lattice Polytopes with applications to toric geometry), which has been incorporated in the SAGE (Software for Algebra and Geometry Experimentation) project, has not yet been documented in full detail. This book contains a user manual for a new thoroughly revised version of PALP.By including these two very useful original contributions, researchers in quantum field theory, string theory, and mathematics will find added value in a pedagogical presentation of the classification of quantum gauge field anomalies, and the accompanying comprehensive manual and tutorial for the powerful software package PALP.

This book collects the proceedings of a series of conferences dedicated to birational geometry of Fano varieties held in Moscow, Shanghai and Pohang The conferences were focused on the following two related problems: * existence of Kahler-Einstein metrics on Fano varieties * degenerations of Fano varieties on which two famous conjectures were recently proved. The first is the famous Borisov-Alexeev-Borisov Conjecture on the boundedness of Fano varieties, proved by Caucher Birkar (for which he was awarded the Fields medal in 2018), and the second one is the (arguably even more famous) Tian-Yau-Donaldson Conjecture on the existence of Kahler-Einstein metrics on (smooth) Fano varieties and K-stability, which was proved by Xiuxiong Chen, Sir Simon Donaldson and Song Sun. The solutions for these longstanding conjectures have opened new directions in birational and Kahler geometries. These research directions generated new interesting mathematical problems, attracting the attention of mathematicians worldwide. These conferences brought together top researchers in both fields (birational geometry and complex geometry) to solve some of these problems and understand the relations between them. The result of this activity is collected in this book, which contains contributions by sixty nine mathematicians, who contributed forty three research and survey papers to this volume. Many of them were participants of the Moscow-Shanghai-Pohang conferences, while the others helped to expand the research breadth of the volume - the diversity of their contributions reflects the vitality of modern Algebraic Geometry.

This volume is a tribute to Maxim Kontsevich, one of the most original and influential mathematicians of our time. Maxim's vision has inspired major developments in many areas of mathematics, ranging all the way from probability theory to motives over finite fields, and has brought forth a paradigm shift at the interface of modern geometry and mathematical physics. Many of his papers have opened completely new directions of research and led to the solutions of many classical problems. This book collects papers by leading experts currently engaged in research on topics close to Maxim's heart. Contributors: S. Donaldson A. Goncharov D. Kaledin M. Kapranov A. Kapustin L. Katzarkov A. Noll P. Pandit S. Pimenov J. Ren P. Seidel C. Simpson Y. Soibelman R. Thorngren