Victor Turchin: Manifold functor calculus, embedding spaces and the operad of little discs
Time: Wed 2018-12-19 13.15 - 15.00
Location: Room 3418, KTH
Participating: Victor Turchin (Kansas State University)
The functor calculus on manifolds was invented by Thomas Goodwillie and Michael Weiss in order to study spaces of embeddings. This approach can be seen as a generalization of the Smale–Hirsch–Gromov h-principle that allows one to reduce difficult geometrical problems to homotopy theoretical ones. Similarly to the h-principle it can be algebraically interpreted as a homotopy sheafification of topological presheaves on smooth manifolds. In my talk I will give a short introduction to the functor calculus. I will explain how it is used in the study of embedding spaces and how the little discs operad comes to interplay.