Partition functions for supersymmetric black holes

This dissertation presents recent discoveries on partition functions for four-dimensional supersymmetric black holes. These partition functions are important tools to explain the entropy of black holes from a microscopic point of view within string theory and M-theory. The results are applied to two central research topics in modern theoretical physics, namely (1) the correspondence between the physics (including gravity) within an Anti-de Sitter space and conformal field theory, and (2) the relation between black holes and topological strings.