Calabi-Yau Geometries: Algorithms, Databases, and Physics

With a bird's-eye view, we survey the landscape of Calabi-Yau threefolds, compact and non-compact, smooth and singular. Emphasis will be placed on the algorithms and databases which have been established over the years, and how they have been useful in the interaction between the physics and the mathematics, especially in string and gauge theories. A skein which runs through this review will be algorithmic and computational algebraic geometry and how, implementing its principles on powerful computers and experimenting with the vast mathematical data, new physics can be learnt. It is hoped that this inter-disciplinary glimpse will be of some use to the beginning student.