Ten years after a 1989 meeting of number theorists and physicists at the Centre de Physique des Houches, a second event focused on the broader interface of number theory, geometry, and physics. This book is the first of two volumes resulting from that meeting. Broken into three parts, it covers Conformal Field Theories, Discrete Groups, and Renormalization, offering extended versions of the lecture courses and shorter texts on special topics.

Ten years after a 1989 meeting of number theorists and physicists at the Centre de Physique des Houches, a second event focused on the broader interface of number theory, geometry, and physics. This book is the first of two volumes resulting from that meeting. Broken into three parts, it covers Conformal Field Theories, Discrete Groups, and Renormalization, offering extended versions of the lecture courses and shorter texts on special topics.

The relation between mathematics and physics has a long history, in which the role of number theory and of other more abstract parts of mathematics has recently become more prominent. More than 10 years after a first meeting between number theorists and physicists at the Centre de Physique des Houches, a second two-week event focused on the broader interface of number theory, geometry, and physics. This book collects the material presented at this meeting.