This book contains thirty-six short papers on recent progress in a variety of subjects in mathematical and theoretical physics, written for the proceedings of a symposium in honor of the seventieth birthday of Professor F Y Wu, held at the Nankai Institute of Mathematics, October 7–11, 2001. The collection of papers is aimed at researchers, including graduate students, with an interdisciplinary interest and gives a brief introduction to many of the topics of current interest. These include new results on exactly solvable models in statistical mechanics, integrable through the Yang–Baxter equations, quantum groups, fractional statistics, random matrices, index theorems on the lattice, combinatorics, and other related topics.