Moment maps and the Yang-Mills functional

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.

Written articles will accompany each lecture in this series and be available as part of the publication “History and Literature of Mathematical Science.”

For more information, please visit the event page.

Register here to attend.