Conceptual History of Space and Symmetry

Pietro Frè is Professor of Theoretical Physics at the University of Torino, Italy. He recently served as Scientific Counsellor of the Italian Embassy in Moscow. He has taught General Relativity for 15 years. His scientific passion lies in supergravity and all allied topics, since the inception of the field, in 1976. He was professor at SISSA, worked in the USA and at CERN. He has taught General Relativity for 15 years. He has previously published five science monographs. He is also the author of a popular science book on cosmology (“Il fascino oscuro dell’inflazione”, Springer 2009), and two novels, in Italian.

• The Episteme.- Symmetry and Mathematics.- How Group Theory came into Being.- From Crystals to Plato.- The Long Tale of Lie Groups.- Hermann Weyl and Representation Theory.- A Short History of Differential Geometry.- Geometry Becomes Complex.- Geometry Becomes Special.- Black Holes: The Physics of Geometry.- Modern Manifolds from Ancient Polyhedra.- Epilogue.