Lectures of David Olive on gauge theories and Lie algebras: with some applications to spontaneous symmetry breaking and integrable dynamical systems

Professor David Olive was a renowned British theoretical physicist who made seminal contributions to superstrings, quantum gauge theories and mathematical physics. He was awarded the Dirac Medal by the International Centre for Theoretical Physics in Trieste in 1997, with his long-standing collaborator Peter Goddard. David Olive was a Fellow of the Royal Society and a Founding Fellow of the Learned Society of Wales. David Olive was known for his visionary conjectures, including electromagnetic duality in spontaneously broken gauge theories, as well as his exceptionally clear and insightful style of exposition. These lectures, delivered by David Olive in 1982 at the University of Virginia, provide a pedagogical, self-contained introduction to gauge theory, Lie algebras, electromagnetic duality and integrable models. Despite enormous subsequent developments, they still provide a valuable entry point to some of the deepest topics in quantum gauge theory.