Strings is a series of international conferences on the topic of string theory and quantum gravity, held annually since 1988. It is a key event for the string theory community. In 2004, it gathered about 400 participants, with several more online. Important topics in string theory have been introduced for the first time during these conferences.
History
The first conference, Strings '88 was held from May 24 to 28, 1988 at the University of Maryland, College Park. It was inspired by the International Workshop on Strings, Composite Structures and Cosmology held in the same venue a year before.
The conferences were not that promising at first and some scientists suggested to stop the annual meetings, however it gained popularity in the 1990s. During Strings '95. Edward Witten discussed the concept of M-theory, sparking the second superstring revolution. In Strings '96, Tom Banks, Willy Fischler, Stephen Shenker, and Leonard Susskind introduced matrix theory; and during Strings '98, Jeffrey A. Harvey composed a song in the tune of "Macarena" to celebrate Juan Maldacena recent discovery of AdS/CFT correspondence.
Physics Problems for the Next Millennium During the Strings 2000, participants proposed and selected a "Top Ten Problems in Fundamental Physics for the Next Millennium", similar to the Millennium Prize Problems in mathematics. The problems are: +#StatementProponents1Are all the (measurable) dimensionless parameters that characterize the physical universe calculable in principle or are some merely determined by historical or quantum mechanical accident and uncalculable?David Gross2How can quantum gravity help explain the origin of the universe?Edward Witten3What is the lifetime of the proton and how do we understand it?Steven Gubser4Is Nature supersymmetric, and if so, how is supersymmetry broken?Sergio Ferrara and Gordon L. Kane5Why does the universe appear to have one time and three space dimensions?Shamit Kachru, Sunil Mukhi and Hirosi Ooguri6Why does the cosmological constant have the value that it has, is it zero and is it really constant?Andrew Chambliss and Renata Kallosh7What are the fundamental degrees of freedom of M-theory (the theory whose low-energy limit is eleven-dimensional supergravity and which subsumes the five consistent superstring theories) and does the theory describe Nature?Louise Dolan, Annamaria Sinkovics, and Billy & Linda Rose8What is the resolution of the black hole information paradox?Tibra Ali and Samir D. Mathur9What physics explains the enormous disparity between the gravitational scale and the typical mass scale of the elementary particles?Matt Strassler10Can we quantitatively understand quark and gluon confinement in Quantum Chromodynamics and the existence of a mass gap?Igor Klebanov and Oyvind Tafjord
List of conferences Here is a list of Strings conferences: Year Institution Location1988University of Maryland, College Park USA 1989 Texas A&M University USA 1990 Texas A&M University USA 1991 Stony Brook University USA 1993 Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory USA 1995 University of Southern California USA 1996 Institute for Theoretical Physics, Santa Barbara USA 1997 University of Amsterdam Netherlands 1998 Institute for Theoretical Physics, Santa Barbara USA 1999 Max Planck Institute, Potsdam Germany 2000 University of Michigan, Ann Arbor USA 2001 Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Mumbai India 2002 University of Cambridge United Kingdom 2003 Kyoto University Japan 2004 Collège de France, Paris France 2005 University of Toronto Canada 2006 Beijing China 2007 Autonomous University of Madrid Spain 2008 CERN Switzerland 2009 Pontifical University of Saint Thomas Aquinas Italy 2010 Texas A&M University USA 2011 Uppsala University Sweden 2012 LMU Munich Germany 2013 Sogang University Korea 2014 Princeton University and Institute for Advanced Study USA 2015 International Centre for Theoretical Sciences, Bengaluru India 2016 Tsinghua University China 2017 Tel Aviv Israel 2018 Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology Japan 2019 Brussels Belgium 2020 Cape Town (online) South Africa 2021 ICTP-South American Institute for Fundamental Research (online) Brazil 2022 Vienna Austria 2023 Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics Canada2024CERNSwitzerland2025New York University Abu DhabiUnited Arab Emirates2026 Shanghai Institute for Mathematics and Interdisciplinary Sciences (SIMIS) & Fudan UniversityChina
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