Preface

I do not think that I need to explain, in the preface to a book that is all about graphene, what graphene is and why it is important. After the Nobel Prize for physics in 2010, everybody should have heard something about graphene. I do need, however, to explain why I wrote this book and what is special about it.

I hope it will not be considered a disclosure of insider information if I tell you that Andre Geim is a bit sarcastic (especially with theoreticians). Every time I mentioned that I was somewhat busy writing a book on graphene, he always replied ‘Go to amazon.com and search for “graphene”.’ Indeed, there are many books on graphene, many more reviews and infinitely many collections of papers and conference proceedings (well, not really infinitely many . . . in the main text I will use the mathematical terminology in a more rigorous way, I promise). Why, nevertheless, has this book been written and why may it be worthwhile for you to read it?

Of course, this is a personal view of the field. I do love it, and it has been my main scientific activity during the last seven years, from 2004 when graphene started to be the subject of intensive and systematic investigations. Luckily, I was involved in this development almost from the very beginning. It was a fantastic experience to watch a whole new world coming into being and to participate in the development of a new language for this new world. I would like to try to share this experience with the readers of this book.