This book explores string topology, Hochschild and cyclic homology, assembling material from a wide scattering of scholarly sources in a single practical volume. The first part offers a thorough and elegant exposition of various approaches to string topology and the Chas-Sullivan loop product. The second gives a complete and clear construction of an algebraic model for computing topological cyclic homology.

Contains the proceedings of the Third Arolla Conference on Algebraic Topology, which took place in Arolla, Switzerland, on August 18-24, 2008. This title includes research papers on stable homotopy theory, the theory of operads, localization and algebraic K-theory, as well as survey papers on the Witten genus and localization techniques.

Held during algebraic topology special sessions at the Vietnam Institute for Advanced Studies in Mathematics (VIASM, Hanoi), this set of notes consists of expanded versions of three courses given by G. Ginot, H.-W. Henn and G. Powell. They are all introductory texts and can be used by PhD students and experts in the field. Among the three contributions, two concern stable homotopy of spheres: Henn focusses on the chromatic point of view, the Morava K(n)-localization and the cohomology of the Morava stabilizer groups. Powell’s chapter is concerned with the derived functors of the destabilization and iterated loop functors and provides a small complex to compute them. Indications are given for the odd prime case. Providing an introduction to some aspects of string and brane topology, Ginot’s contribution focusses on Hochschild homology and its generalizations. It contains a number of new results and fills a gap in the literature.

This book elaborates on an idea put forward by M. Abouzaid on equipping the Morse cochain complex of a smooth Morse function on a closed oriented manifold with the structure of an A∞-algebra by means of perturbed gradient flow trajectories. This approach is a variation on K. Fukaya’s definition of Morse-A∞-categories for closed oriented manifolds involving families of Morse functions. To make A∞-structures in Morse theory accessible to a broader audience, this book provides a coherent and detailed treatment of Abouzaid’s approach, including a discussion of all relevant analytic notions and results, requiring only a basic grasp of Morse theory. In particular, no advanced algebra skills are required, and the perturbation theory for Morse trajectories is completely self-contained. In addition to its relevance for finite-dimensional Morse homology, this book may be used as a preparation for the study of Fukaya categories in symplectic geometry. It will be of interest to researchers in mathematics (geometry and topology), and to graduate students in mathematics with a basic command of the Morse theory.

This volume, in honor of Yakov Eliashberg, gives a panorama of some of the most fascinating recent developments in symplectic, contact and gauge theories. It contains research papers aimed at experts, as well as a series of skillfully written surveys accessible for a broad geometrically oriented readership from the graduate level onwards. This collection will serve as an enduring source of information and ideas for those who want to enter this exciting area as well as for experts.

The first instances of deformation theory were given by Kodaira and Spencer for complex structures and by Gerstenhaber for associative algebras. Since then, deformation theory has been applied as a useful tool in the study of many other mathematical structures, and even today it plays an important role in many developments of modern mathematics. This volume collects a few self-contained and peer-reviewed papers by experts which present up-to-date research topics in algebraic and motivic topology, quantum field theory, algebraic geometry, noncommutative geometry and the deformation theory of Poisson algebras. They originate from activities at the Max-Planck-Institute for Mathematics and the Hausdorff Center for Mathematics in Bonn.

Contributions by three authors treat aspects of noncommutative geometry that are related to cyclic homology. The authors give rather complete accounts of cyclic theory from different points of view. The connections between (bivariant) K-theory and cyclic theory via generalized Chern-characters are discussed in detail. Cyclic theory is the natural setting for a variety of general abstract index theorems. A survey of such index theorems is given and the concepts and ideas involved in these theorems are explained.