Bosonic string theory is the original version of string theory, developed in the late 1960s.
In the early 1970s, supersymmetry was discovered in the context of string theory, and a new version of string theory called superstring theory (supersymmetric string theory) became the real focus. Nevertheless, bosonic string theory remains a very useful "toy model" to understand many general features of perturbative string theory, and string theory textbooks usually start with the bosonic string. The first volume of Polchinski's String Theory and Zwiebach's A First Course in String Theory are good examples.
Read more about Bosonic String Theory: Problems, Mathematics
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