Abstract :

String theory was originally developed as a theory of the strong interactions. This approach largely disappeared due to the discovery of asymptotic freedom and the development of QCD , and string theory later came to be viewed as an approach to quantum gravity and unification. Recent developments growing out of the AdS/CFT correspondence have revived the connection between string theory and the strong interactions. I will describe elements of this history and discuss recent progress in using string theory to model the strong interactions.