This is a talk delivered at the Workshop on Quantum Fields and Strings of the 2014 Corfu Summer Institute. We discuss how giant magnons emerge in the context of the AdS5/CFT4 correspondence as the gravity duals of N = 4 super Yang-Mills magnon excita
tions. Then we present a new analytic expression for the dispersion relation of classical finite-size giant magnons with Lamberts W-function.
We study membrane configurations in AdS_{7/4}xS^{4/7}. The membranes are wrapped around the compact manifold S^{4/7} and are dynamically equivalent to bosonic strings in AdS_5. We thus conveniently identify them as Stringy Membranes. For the case of
AdS_7xS^4, their construction is carried out by embedding the Polyakov action for classical bosonic strings in AdS_5, into the corresponding membrane action. Therefore, every string configuration in AdS_5 can be realized by an appropriately chosen stringy membrane in AdS_7xS^4. We discuss the possibility of this being also the case for stringy membranes in AdS_4xS^7/Z^k (k > 1 or k = 1). By performing a stability analysis to the constructed solutions, we find that the (membrane) fluctuations along their transverse directions are organized in multiple Lam{e} stability bands and gaps in the space of parameters of the configurations. In this membrane picture, strings exhibit a single band/gap structure.
