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Deformation Theory Seminar

Wednesday, February 11, 2004 - 1:45pm

Thomas Tradler

GC-CUNY

Location

University of Pennsylvania

4N30

originally scheduled Feb 4

Since the discovery of homotopy algebras by Stasheff in the 1960's, the usefulness of this concept has been widely demonstrated in many areas of mathematics and physics. However in some situations, the original algebra structure comes equipped with a compatible inner product. In the talk, we will introduce a concept of homotopy inner products which is along the lines of generalizing "algebras" to "homotopy algebras". Some applications, such as String Topology and an extension of the Gerstenhaber structure on the Hochschild complex will be given.