Lecture for the Fortieth Anniversary of Supergravity

Lecture for the Fortieth Anniversary of Supergravity In the first part of this lecture, some very basic ideas in supersymmetry and supergravity
are presented at a level accessible to readers with modest background in quantum field theory and general relativity. The second part is an outline of a recent paper of the author and his collaborators on the AdS/CFT correspondence applied to the ABJM gauge theory with N = 8 supersymmetry. The first paper on supergravity in D = 4 spacetime dimensions [1] was submitted to the Physical Review in late March, 1976. It was a great honor for me that the fortieth anniversary of this event was one of the features of the 54th Course at the Ettore Majorana
Foundation and Centre for Scientific Culture in June, 1976. This note contains some of the material from my lectures there. The first part focuses on the most basic ideas of the subjects of supersymmetry and supergravity, ideas which I hope will be interesting for aspiring physics students. The second part summarizes the results of the paper [2] on what might be called a curiosity of the AdS/CFT correspondence.