acknowledgements.tex

Firstly, I would like to thank thank Prof.\ Philsang Yoo for agreeing to be my advisor and for dedicating much of his time (not to mention his Monday lunches) to help guide me along as I worked through understanding the many ideas necessary to write this thesis. I especially want to thank him for his patience when I was struggling with the more difficult parts of this program, and for his excellent ability to get to the heart of matters in pointing out what was important for me to understand.

I would also like to thank the past professors that I have had at Yale for building my background up so that I could complete this thesis. In particular, I would like to thank Prof. David Poland for giving me the unique opportunity to get my hands dirty working with conformal theory early in my undergraduate career, and for his guidance throughout my time at Yale. Second, I would like to thank Professors Igor Frenkel and Walter Goldberger for providing me with courses that challenged me and pushed me to the furthest limits of any other academic experience as an undergraduate. Further, I would like to thank Professor Gregg Zuckerman for his friendship and advice throughout my time here.

Lastly, I would like to thank my friends and colleagues, Aaron Hillman, Andrew Saydjari, Andrew Salmon, and Stanislav Atanasov for being part of this journey with me. I want to thank them for the numerous and meaningful conversations that they engaged me with. Especially, I owe Stanislav thanks for his time spent making helpful edits on the sections of this thesis that involved number theory. I wish them all the best in their future scientific pursuits, and look forward to seeing them flourish.