A perspective projection of a dodecahedral tessellation in H3. Four dodecahedra meet at each edge, and eight meet at each vertex, like the cubes of a cubic tessellation in E3.

Title: An introduction to microformal morphisms and their pullbacks

Speaker: Andreas Swerdlow

Abstract: Microformal or thick morphisms, introduced by Ted Voronov,  are a generalisation of smooth maps between manifolds that still give rise to pullbacks on functions. These pullbacks are in general nonlinear and formal, and in special cases they define L-infinity morphisms between the algebras of functions on homotopy Poisson or homotopy Schouten manifolds. In this talk, I will give a brief introduction to thick morphisms (of which there are so called classical and quantum versions),  and describe a graphical calculus which calculates all terms in the formal power series that result from their pullbacks. The method heavily resembles the use of Feynman diagrams in perturbative quantum field theory, and the relationship between the calculi for classical and quantum thick morphisms is exactly the relationship between the tree-level and full perturbative expansions in QFT.

Some snacks will be provided before and after the talk.

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