Four and a half year ago there was a conference and summer school on the four topics of the title (part of the G2 series of conferences, whose hiistory you can read here) at the Three Gorges Mathematics Center in Yichang, China.
Now a book containing the notes from four lecture courses on the four topics is out. (Actually not quitef – it is published at the end of this month – but the editors, Rosemary Bailey, Yaokun We and I, have received our copies.)
There were various ups and downs in the production of the book, most of which I will leave unsaid. But the editing tested my LaTeX skills in a number of ways.
The authors had their own carefully-thought-out views on the layout of their chapters; but the publisher wanted a uniform style. Some compromise was necessary.
The toughest challenge; two of the chapters used LaTeX packages which conflicted. If loaded one way round, they would not run; the other way, the second overwrote the commands of the first producing unwanted results. In the end I had to load one package, save a couple of commands with different names using the plain TeX \let command, and then load the other package.
There were also a couple of problems with the way the publisher’s style file interacted with indexing commands; we let the publisher resolve that one.
Anyway, you can see details of the book (and order it) here.
