Author Description

The Białowieża workshops on Geometric Methods in Physics, taking place in the unique environment of the Białowieża natural forest in Poland, are among the important meetings in the field. Every year some 80 to 100 participants both from mathematics and physics join to discuss new developments and to interchange ideas. The current volume was produced on the occasion of the XXXI meeting in 2012. For the first time the workshop was followed by a School on Geometry and Physics, which consisted of advanced lectures for graduate students and young researchers. Selected speakers of the workshop were asked to contribute, and additional review articles were added. The selection shows that despite its now long tradition the workshop remains always at the cutting edge of ongoing research. The XXXI workshop had as a special topic the works of the late Boris Vasilievich Fedosov (1938–2011) who is best known for a simple and very natural construction of a deformation quantization for any symplectic manifold, and for his contributions to index theory.