The Floer Jungle

There’s a remarkable new book out about the life and work of Andreas Floer, entitled The Floer Jungle, co-written by writer Siobhan Roberts (author of some great biographies of mathematicians) and mathematician Helmut Hofer. Hofer has also given talks recently covering the material in the book, see for instance video here and slides here. The story of Floer’s career and his work is a fascinating one. The book is written at a mixture of levels, starting out with some chapters explaining background at an easily accessible level, but then moving on to the details of the symplectic geometry and topology issues for which Floer’s work provided a breakthrough, some of which will be of most interest to experts. Like many people, I first heard of Floer’s ideas from Michael Atiyah, in my case at the May 1987 Duke conference that I wrote about in detail here. I’ll refer to that posting for a description of the context for why the idea of “Floer homology” has wide significance beyond its origins.…