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Deformation Theory Seminar

Wednesday, September 18, 2019 - 1:30pm

Peter May

U Chicago

Location

University of Pennsylvania

DRL 4C4

An informal talk NOT a prequel to the Colloquium. Notice the time is not yet definite, dependent on room - either 1:30 or usual 2

 (Joint work with Ruoqi Zhang and Foling Zou)  Operads were
introduced in 1971.  Max Kelly reinterpreted the definition monoidally,
also in 1971, although his paper was only published in 2005.   The name
operad combines operations and monads, and the bar construction leads to
applications starting from the monadic reinterpretation of algebras over
operads.  Foling's work on factorization homology led us to a compelling
new variant of Kelly's monoidal redefinition that is closer to the
applications, and we have  compared the monoidal bar construction that
is implicit in that redefinition with the classical monadic bar
construction that is used both in the original applications to iterated
loop space theory and in factorization homology.   I'll try to give a
leisurely nontechnical overview.