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String theory has had a profound influence on research in Calabi-Yau spaces over the past twenty-five years. We first briefly mention some of the work in Khler Calabi-Yau manifolds that was influenced by the discovery of mirror symmetry in the late 1980s. We then discuss some of the mathematical motivations behind the recent work on non-Khler Calabi-Yau manifolds, which arise in string compactifications with fluxes. After extending mirror symmetry to non-Khler Calabi-Yau manifolds, we show how this leads to new cohomologies and invariants of non-Khler symplectic manifolds.

We classify three dimensional isolated weighted homogeneous rational complete intersection singularities, which define many new four dimensional N= 2 superconformal field theories. We also determine the mini-versal deformation of these singularities, and therefore solve the Coulomb branch spectrum and Seiberg-Witten solution.

For the SU (N) invariant supersymmetric matrix model related to membranes in 4 space-time dimensions we argue that< Psi, chi>= 0 for the previously obtained solution of Q chi= 0, Q^{dagger} Psi= 0.

In this paper, we extend our previous work to construct (0, 2) Toda-like mirrors to A/2-twisted theories on more general spaces, as part of a program of understanding (0,2) mirror symmetry. Specifically, we propose (0, 2) mirrors to GLSMs on toric del Pezzo surfaces and Hirzebruch surfaces with deformations of the tangent bundle. We check the results by comparing correlation functions, global symmetries, as well as geometric blowdowns with the corresponding (0, 2) Toda-like mirrors. We also briefly discuss Grassmannian manifolds.