At the banquet that concluded the Strings ‘98 conference held in Santa Barbara, California, some 300 theoretical physicists danced the “Maldacena,” a version of the then-popular Macarena. Their giddy behavior was inspired by Juan Maldacena’s conjecture that a profound relationship exists between four-dimensional gauge theories and string theories formulated in 10 dimensions. 1  

Maldacena (Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey) had built on work of Steven Gubser, Igor Klebanov, Alexander Polyakov, and many others. In the duality he described, certain problems in gauge theories with strong interactions can be recast as equivalent problems in a theory of weakly interacting strings (see Physics Today, August 1998, page 20). Because the behavior of such strings is dominated by massless particles—gravitons in appropriate scenarios—the Maldacena duality relates gauge theories to 10D gravity. With the help of the duality, a battery of novel techniques can be brought to bear on...

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