Product Description: This book is an outgrowth of the activities of the Center for Geometry and Mathematical Physics (CGMP) at Penn State from 1996 to 1998. The Center was created in the Mathematics Department at Penn State in the fall of 1996 for the purpose of promoting and supporting the activities of researchers and students in and around geometry and physics at the university...read more

Product Description: This book examines the differential geometry of manifolds, loop spaces, line bundles and groupoids, and the relations of this geometry to mathematical physics. Applications presented in the book involve anomaly line bundles on loop spaces and anomaly functionals, central extensions of loop groups, Kähler geometry of the space of knots, and Cheeger--Chern--Simons secondary characteristics classes...read more