Prof. Dr. Walter Dittrich was head of the quantum electrodynamics group at the University of Tübingen before his retirement in 2001 and is still actively publishing papers and books in classical and quantum physics. He received his doctorate under Prof. Heinz Mitter at Heisenberg's institute in Munich and continued pre- and postdoc work at Brown University, Harvard and MIT. He profited immensely from lectures by and discussions with Profs. Herb Fried, Ken Johnson, Steve Weinberg, Julian Schwinger and, later on, at the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) in Princeton, Steve Adler and David Gross at Princeton University. He started his work on gauge theories and QED in collaboration with Schwinger in the late 1960s. He was visiting professor at UCLA, Berkeley, Stanford and the IAS. He has over 30 years of teaching experience and is one of the key scientists in developing the theoretical framework of quantum electrodynamics.

Classical Yang-mills theory.- Path integral quantization of gauge theories.- Background field methods.- Instantons and ?-Vacua.- Schwinger model (QED)2.- Chiral anomaly in (QCD)2.- Fujikawa's path integral method.- Chiral anomaly in the Schwinger-Symanzik formalism.- Anomalous ward identities à la Wess-Zumino.- Topological aspects of the Wess-Zumino effective action.- Topological baryon number and the Skyrme model.- The Atiyah-Singer index theorem (for the Euclidean Dirac operator).- Chiral anomalies and differential geometry.- Effective gauge theory actions in (2n + 1) dimensions.- Chiral anomaly with gravitational background field.- Vacuum charge in 2n + 1 dimensions.