Fundamental problems of gauge field theory

As a result of the experimental and theoretical developments of the last two decades, gauge field theory, in one form or another, now provides the standard language for the description of Nature; QCD and the standard model of the electroweak interactions illustrate this point. It is a basic task of mathematical physics to provide a solid foundation for these developments by putting the theory in a physically transparent and mathematically rigorous form. The lecture notes collected in this volume concentrate on the many unsolved problems which arise here, and on the general ideas and methods which have been proposed for their solution. In particular, the use of rigorous renormalization group methods to obtain control over the continuum limit of lattice gauge field theories, the exploration of the extraordinary enigmatic connections between Kac-Moody-Virasoro algebras and string theory, and the systematic use of the theory of local algebras and indefinite metric spaces to classify the charged C* states in gauge field theories are mentioned