Frances Kirwan (University of Oxford)
Title: Moment maps and the Yang-Mills functional
Abstract: In the early 1980s Michael Atiyah and Raoul Bott wrote two influential papers, ‘The Yang-Mills equations over Riemann surfaces’ and ‘The moment map and equivariant cohomology’, bringing together ideas ranging from algebraic and symplectic geometry through algebraic topology to mathematical physics and number theory. The aim of this talk is to explain their key insights and some of the new directions towards which these papers led.
This talk is part of a subprogram of the Mathematical Science Literature Lecture series, a Memorial Conference for the founders of index theory: Atiyah, Bott, Hirzebruch and Singer.
Talk chair: Peter Kronheimer