Martin Markl - Böcker

'Operads are powerful tools, and this is the book in which to read about them' - ""Bulletin of the London Mathematical Society"". Operads are mathematical devices that describe algebraic structures of many varieties and in various categories. Operads are particularly important in categories with a good notion of 'homotopy', where they play a key role in organizing hierarchies of higher homotopies. Significant examples from algebraic topology first appeared in the sixties, although the formal definition and appropriate generality were not forged until the seventies. In the nineties, a renaissance and further development of the theory were inspired by the discovery of new relationships with graph cohomology, representation theory, algebraic geometry, derived categories, Morse theory, symplectic and contact geometry, combinatorics, knot theory, moduli spaces, cyclic cohomology, and, last but not least, theoretical physics, especially string field theory and deformation quantization. The book contains a detailed and comprehensive historical introduction describing the development of operad theory from the initial period when it was a rather specialized tool in homotopy theory to the present when operads have a wide range of applications in algebra, topology, and mathematical physics. Many results and applications currently scattered in the literature are brought together here along with new results and insights. The basic definitions and constructions are carefully explained and include many details not found in any of the standard literature.

This book brings together both the classical and current aspects of deformation theory. The presentation is mostly self-contained, assuming only basic knowledge of commutative algebra, homological algebra and category theory. In the interest of readability, some technically complicated proofs have been omitted when a suitable reference was available. The relation between the uniform continuity of algebraic maps and topologized tensor products is explained in detail, however, as this subject does not seem to be commonly known and the literature is scarce. The exposition begins by recalling Gerstenhaber's classical theory for associative algebras. The focus then shifts to a homotopy-invariant setup of Maurer-Cartan moduli spaces. As an application, Kontsevich's approach to deformation quantization of Poisson manifolds is reviewed. Then, after a brief introduction to operads, a strongly homotopy Lie algebra governing deformations of (diagrams of) algebras of a given type is described, followed by examples and generalizations.

This volume contains the proceedings of the AMS Special Session on Higher Structures in Topology, Geometry, and Physics, held virtually on March 26-27, 2022. The articles give a snapshot survey of the current topics surrounding the mathematical formulation of field theories. There is an intricate interplay between geometry, topology, and algebra which captures these theories. The hallmark are higher structures, which one can consider as the secondary algebraic or geometric background on which the theories are formulated. The higher structures considered in the volume are generalizations of operads, models for conformal field theories, string topology, open/closed field theories, BF/BV formalism, actions on Hochschild complexes and related complexes, and their geometric and topological aspects.