Lizhen Ji

Professor Chen-Ning Yang is best known for his achievements in Physics. He has also made significant contributions to the development of mathematics, as mathematics is extensively used in his research. In his long and fruitful academic career, he has witnessed many important events in the fields of Physics and Mathematics, and has collaborated or interacted with many great scientists in history. This book records eight interviews with Professor Chen-Ning Yang, which were conducted by the authors from 2016 to 2019. Through Professor Yang's unique perspective, major scientific events in the 20th century were revisited vividly, elaborating the development and mutual influences of mathematics and physics, as well as unveiling the academic work, the daily lives, and the personalities of scientists, as well as their collaboration and competition, some stories unknown to the public before are also revealed in this book.

The concept of symmetric space is of central importance in many branches of mathematics. Compactifications of these spaces have been studied from the points of view of representation theory, geometry, and random walks. This work is devoted to the study of the interrelationships among these various compactifications and, in particular, focuses on the martin compactifications. It is the first exposition to treat compactifications of symmetric spaces systematically and to uniformized the various points of view. The work is largely self-contained, with comprehensive references to the literature. It is an excellent resource for both researchers and graduate students.

Noncompact symmetric and locally symmetric spaces naturally appear in many mathematical theories, including analysis (representation theory, nonabelian harmonic analysis), number theory (automorphic forms), algebraic geometry (modulae) and algebraic topology (cohomology of discrete groups). In most applications it is necessary to form an appropriate compactification of the space. The literature dealing with such compactifications is vast. The main purpose of this book is to introduce uniform constructions of most of the known compactifications with emphasis on their geometric and topological structures. The book is divided into three parts. Part I studies compactifications of Riemannian symmetric spaces and their arithmetic quotients. Part II is a study of compact smooth manifolds. Part III studies the compactification of locally symmetric spaces. Familiarity with the theory of semisimple Lie groups is assumed, as is familiarity with algebraic groups defined over the rational numbers in later parts of the book, although most of the pertinent material is recalled as presented. Otherwise, the book is a self-contained reference aimed at graduate students and research mathematicians interested in the applications of Lie theory and representation theory to diverse fields of mathematics.

The concept of symmetric space is of central importance in many branches of mathematics. Compactifications of these spaces have been studied from the points of view of representation theory, geometry, and random walks. This work is devoted to the study of the interrelationships among these various compactifications and, in particular, focuses on the martin compactifications. It is the first exposition to treat compactifications of symmetric spaces systematically and to uniformized the various points of view. The work is largely self-contained, with comprehensive references to the literature. It is an excellent resource for both researchers and graduate students.