I have found an interesting series of articles under the common topic "What is..?" One can browse a small archive of these articles or go to the home page home page of AMS Notices to search for more.
In these notes one can find brief introductions to some mathematical stuff that is usually hard to understand reading books or articles.
The ones that I would like to recommend for reading are "What is a gerbe?" by Nigel Hitchin and "What is a G_2 manifold?" by Spiro Karigiannis. These are interesting because gerbes appear as nice generalisations of fibre bundle and are relevant to the recently developed duality covariant approaches. G2 manifolds play the same role for M-theory compactifications as Calaby-Yau manifolds play for stringy compactifications. These are 7-dimensional (compact) manifolds with a lot of nice properties.
In these notes one can find brief introductions to some mathematical stuff that is usually hard to understand reading books or articles.
The ones that I would like to recommend for reading are "What is a gerbe?" by Nigel Hitchin and "What is a G_2 manifold?" by Spiro Karigiannis. These are interesting because gerbes appear as nice generalisations of fibre bundle and are relevant to the recently developed duality covariant approaches. G2 manifolds play the same role for M-theory compactifications as Calaby-Yau manifolds play for stringy compactifications. These are 7-dimensional (compact) manifolds with a lot of nice properties.
