What is...?

Idea

The Notices of the AMS contain a regular column “What is ...?” which gives a brief explanation of a mathematical notion, including its motivation and its interest for various fields of mathematics. Each contribution is limited to 2 pages. Here a list of more than 110 such contributions can be found. In the context of the ZMP seminar, we want to use a format of short contributions of 15 minutes to explain notions from mathematics, mathematical physics and physics.

Upcoming what is ...?

... a conformal block. 7 November 2024, Volker Schomerus

Past what is ...?

... a brane. 23 October 2014, Christoph Schweigert.
... Teichmüller space. 6 November 2014, Jörg Tescher.
... T-duality. 4 December 2014, Jan Louis.
... a conformal field theory. 18 December 2014, Volker Schomerus.
... a classifying space. 15 January 2015, Christoph Wockel.
... an anomaly polynomial. 5 November 2015, Jan Louis.
... a BPS state. 19 November 2015, Jörg Teschner.
... Wall crossing, mathematics perspective. 3 December 2015 Pavel Sosna.
... Wall crossing, physics perspective. 17 December 2015, Jörg Teschner.
... Gromov-Witten invariants. 14 January 2016, Bernd Siebert.
... HOMFLY polynomial. 7 April 2016, Birgit Richter.
... conformal field theory. 21 April 2016, Ingo Runkel. Slides.
...quiver gauge theory. 12 May 2016, Aswin Balasubramanian.
... Surgery. 16 June 2015, Louis-Hadrien Robert.
... Landau-Ginzburg model. 17 November 2016, Gleb Arutyunov.
... a matrix factorization. 1 December 2016, Ingo Runkel.
... Kontsevich integral. 15 December 2016, Adrien Brochier.
... (Geometric) Langlands duality. 12 January 2017, Jörg Teschner.
... topological matter. 26 January 2017, Thore Posske.
... Khovanov homology. 1 June 2017, Louis-Hadrien Robert.
... the Kontsevich-Soibelman Wall-Crossing. 22 June 2017, Murad Alim.
... the holographic principle. 2 November 2017, Gleb Arutyunov
... BRST and BV. 16 November 2017, Urs Schreiber
... higher Algebra. 30 November 2017, Adrien Brochier.
... localization in quantum field theory. 14 December 2017, Jörg Teschner
... the twisted space of a manifold. 11 January 2018, Arpan Saha
... the Gross-Siebert program. 25 January 2018, Michel van Garrel
... Hawking radiation. 5 April 2018, Arpan Saha
... Drinfeld associator. 19 April 2018, Adrien Brochier
... screening charge. 3 May 2018, Simon Lentner
... a derived stack. 13 June 2024, Julian Holstein
... the derived category to a physicist. 27 June 2024, Jörg Teschner

Wish list and offers

If you want to suggest a certain topic, please send an e-mail to Christoph Schweigert. If you are volunteering to give a “What is...”-talk, whether it is on the wish list or not, please send an e-mail to Christoph Schweigert as well.

Current offers: what is ...

Hubbard Stratanovich transformation. Offer by Gleb Arutyunov.
localization in quantum field theory. Offer by Jörg Teschner.
logarithmic conformal field theory. Offer by Simon Lentner.
quantum group. Offer by Simon Lentner.

Current wish list: what is ...

2-adjoint.
Chern-Simons theory.
a cluster algebra.
a derived category.
Donaldson-Thomas invariants.
Feynman diagrammatics.
a ghost.
Gopakumar-Vafa invariants.
Gromov-Witten invariants.
the Green-Schwarz mechanism.
Hawking radiation.
quiver gauge theory.
toric degeneration.