Thanks to Einstein's relativity theories, our notions of space and time underwent profound revisions about a 100 years ago. The resulting interplay between geometry and physics has dominated all of fundamental physics since then. This volume contains contributions from leading researchers worldwide, who have thought deeply about the nature and consequences of this interplay. The articles take a long-range view of the subject and distill the most important advances in broad terms, making them easily accessible to non-specialists. The first part is devoted to a summary of how relativity theories were born. The second part discusses the most dramatic ramifications of general relativity, such as black holes, space-time, gravitational waves, the large scale structure of the cosmos; experimental status of this theory as well as its practical application to the GPS system. The last part looks beyond Einstein and provides glimpses into what is in store for us in the 21st century.

Understanding the genesis of financial and currency crises, stock market booms and busts, and social and labor unrest is a crucial aspect of making informed managerial decisions. Adverse macroeconomic phenomena can have a catastrophic impact on firm performance — witness the strong companies destroyed by the Mexican tequila crisis. Yet, such episodes also create business opportunities — and not just for the hedge funds and speculators that profit from them. Managers that have a coherent framework for analyzing these phenomena will enjoy a competitive advantage. This book presents a series of case studies taught in the Harvard Business School course “Institutions, Macroeconomics, and the Global Economy”, which addresses the opportunities created by the emergence of a global economy and proposes strategies for managing the risks that globalization entails.

Over the last decade the physics of black holes has been revolutionized by developments that grew out of Jacob Bekenstein's realization that black holes have entropy. Stephen Hawking raised profound issues concerning the loss of information in black hole evaporation and the consistency of quantum mechanics in a world with gravity. For two decades these questions puzzled theoretical physicists and eventually led to a revolution in the way we think about space, time, matter and information. This revolution has culminated in a remarkable principle called “The Holographic Principle”, which is now a major focus of attention in gravitational research, quantum field theory and elementary particle physics. Leonard Susskind, one of the co-inventors of the Holographic Principle as well as one of the founders of String theory, develops and explains these concepts.

Richard Feynman's never previously published doctoral thesis formed the heart of much of his brilliant and profound work in theoretical physics. Entitled “The Principle of Least Action in Quantum Mechanics,” its original motive was to quantize the classical action-at-a-distance electrodynamics. Because that theory adopted an overall space–time viewpoint, the classical Hamiltonian approach used in the conventional formulations of quantum theory could not be used, so Feynman turned to the Lagrangian function and the principle of least action as his points of departure.

The present volume includes Feynman's Princeton thesis, the related review article "Space-Time Approach to Non-Relativistic Quantum Mechanics" [Reviews of Modern Physics 20 (1948), 367–387], Paul Dirac's seminal paper "The Lagrangian in Quantum Mechanics" [Physikalische Zeitschrift der Sowjetunion, Band 3, Heft 1 (1933)], and an introduction by Laurie M Brown.

The first edition of this infiuential book, published in 1970, opened up a completely new field of invariant metrics and hyperbolic manifolds. The large number of papers on the topics covered by the book written since its appearance led Mathematical Reviews to create two new subsections "invariant metrics and pseudo-distances" and "hyperbolic complex manifolds" within the section "holomorphic mappings". The invariant distance introduced in the first edition is now called the "Kobayashi distance" and the hyperbolicity in the sense of this book is called the “Kobayashi hyperbolicity” to distinguish it from other hyperbolicities. This book continues to serve as the best introduction to hyperbolic complex analysis and geometry and is easily accessible to students since very little is assumed. The new edition adds comments on the most recent developments in the field.