  These lectures notes are based on courses given at National Taiwan
University, National Chiao-Tung University, and National Tsing Hua University
in the spring term of 2015. Although the course was offered primarily for
graduate students, these lecture notes have been prepared for a more general
audience. They are intended as an introduction to conformal field theories in
various dimensions, with applications related to topics of particular interest:
topics include the conformal bootstrap program, boundary conformal field
theory, and applications related to the AdS/CFT correspondence. We assume the
reader to be familiar with quantum mechanics at the graduate level and to have
some basic knowledge of quantum field theory. Familiarity with string theory is
not a prerequisite for this lectures, although it can only help.
