Today I heard the talks of Kato and Voisin. Kato was on the moduli space and complex / p-adic mixed Hodge structure analogies. Voisin was on the geometric structure on the cohomology algebras of compact Kaehler manifolds. (Kontsevich will talk tomorrow morning at Keio, Mita Campus.)
The talk of Tohru Eguchi (and conversation between Prof. Kontsevich and Prof. Eguchi) was cancelled because of the Nobel prize in physics. Note that Eguchi was a student of Emer. Prof. Yoichiro Nambu in Chicago University more than 30 years ago. As I used to be a Ph.D. student of Eguchi, I am one of the grandchildren of Nambu.
My work on chiral algebra depends on the Higgs mechanism, which is a kind of symmetry breaking of gauge theory, is somehow a generalization of Nambu-Goldstone bosons (massless particles due to broken "global" symmetry, such as pi mesons inside atoms) into the "local" gauge symmetry (acquiring masses) of "the" standard model of elementary particle physics.
Although the Higgs boson(s) of the standard model is (or "are") now in search of LHC (Large Hadron Collider) in Europe (Geneve, Swiss), the symmetry mechanism in the quantum / statistical field theory is everywhere in theoretical physics (including condensed matter physics) or even in modern mathematics including algebro-geometry. (This standard model is still not established experimentally, because we do not know about the Higgs boson masses or their supersymmetric version (e.g. MSSM), or string theory versions.)
