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Calabi-Yau metrics, CFTs and random matrices

Calabi-Yau manifolds have played a key role in both mathematics and physics, and are particularly important for deriving realistic models of particle physics from string theory. Unfortunately, very little is known about the explicit metrics on these spaces, leaving us unable, for example, to compute particle masses or couplings in these models. We review recent progress in this direction on using numerical approximations to compute the spectrum of the Laplacian on these spaces. We give an example of what one can do with this new "data", giving a surprising link between Calabi-Yau metrics and random matrix theory.