This volume contains papers presented at the meeting Deformation Theory, Symplectic Geometry and Applications, held in Ascona, June 17-21, 1996. The contents touch upon many frontier domains of modern mathematics, mathematical physics and theoretical physics and include authoritative, state-of-the-art contributions by leading scientists. New and important developments in the fields of symplectic geometry, deformation quantization, noncommutative geometry (NCG) and Lie theory are presented. Among the subjects treated are: quantization of general Poisson manifolds; new deformations needed for the quantization of Nambu mechanics; quantization of intersection cardinalities; quantum shuffles; new types of quantum groups and applications; quantum cohomology; strong homotopy Lie algebras; finite- and infinite-dimensional Lie groups; and 2D field theories and applications of NCG to gravity coupled with the standard model. Audience: This book will be of interest to researchers and post-graduate students of mathematical physics, global analysis, analysis on manifolds, topological groups, nonassociative rings and algebras, and Lie algebras.

This volume contains papers presented at the meeting Deformation Theory, Symplectic Geometry and Applications, held in Ascona, June 17-21, 1996. The contents touch upon many frontier domains of modern mathematics, mathematical physics and theoretical physics and include authoritative, state-of-the-art contributions by leading scientists. New and important developments in the fields of symplectic geometry, deformation quantization, noncommutative geometry (NCG) and Lie theory are presented. Among the subjects treated are: quantization of general Poisson manifolds; new deformations needed for the quantization of Nambu mechanics; quantization of intersection cardinalities; quantum shuffles; new types of quantum groups and applications; quantum cohomology; strong homotopy Lie algebras; finite- and infinite-dimensional Lie groups; and 2D field theories and applications of NCG to gravity coupled with the standard model. Audience: This book will be of interest to researchers and post-graduate students of mathematical physics, global analysis, analysis on manifolds, topological groups, nonassociative rings and algebras, and Lie algebras.

Poisson geometry lies at the cusp of noncommutative algebra and differential geometry, with natural and important links to classical physics and quantum mechanics. This book presents an introduction to the subject from a small group of leading researchers, and the result is a volume accessible to graduate students or experts from other fields. The contributions are: Poisson Geometry and Morita Equivalence by Bursztyn and Weinstein; Formality and Star Products by Cattaneo; Lie Groupoids, Sheaves and Cohomology by Moerdijk and Mrcun; Geometric Methods in Representation Theory by Schmid; Deformation Theory: A Powerful Tool in Physics Modelling by Sternheimer.