Editing Wu-Yang Dictionary (section)

== Historical context ==

The dictionary originated from a 1975 paper by physicists Tai Tsun Wu and [[CN Yang|Chen Ning Yang]] (often abbreviated as Wu–Yang), as well as [[Jim Simons]] (unacknowledged), published while they were at Stony Brook University. Their work built on earlier hints of connections between gauge theory and fiber bundles, such as lectures by Andrzej Trautman in 1967 at King's College London. The paper specifically examined electromagnetism in the context of the Aharonov–Bohm effect (where an electron's phase is affected by a magnetic field it doesn't directly encounter) and compared it to fiber bundle concepts. In 1976, mathematician Isadore Singer shared the paper with colleagues like Michael Atiyah, sparking collaborations. Yang also discussed these ideas with mathematician Shiing-Shen Chern in 1975, noting how fiber bundles apply to gauge fields. By 1977, Trautman used the dictionary to connect Paul Dirac's 1931 monopole quantization condition to the Hopf fibration (a mathematical structure proposed by Heinz Hopf in 1931). Notably, Jim Simons (a mathematician and hedge fund founder) observed that Dirac had essentially discovered trivial and nontrivial fiber bundles before mathematicians formalized them. The dictionary has been credited with bridging gaps between mathematics and physics, influencing fields like Donaldson theory (developed by Simon Donaldson in the 1980s).