nLab A Survey of Cohomological Physics

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Content

Jim Stasheff has spent much of his work on identifying and studying cohomological (as in: homological algebra) and homotopical (as in: homotopy theory) structures in physics.

This includes notably the invention and study of homotopy-coherent structures such as A-infinity operads, A-infinity algebras and L-infinity-algebras and their application to BV theory, string field theory (longer list of links should eventually go here).

The above survey lists key concepts and collects references to further literature.

Higher categorical background

Essentially using variants of the Dold-Kan correspondence one may regard many of these differential graded algebra structures as higher categorical structures. For instance the pretriangulated dg-categories formed by homotopy coherent structures are presentations for stable (infinity,1)-categories.

In this sense “cohomological physics” is understood as part of n-categorical physics.

category: reference

Last revised on July 29, 2016 at 18:14:22. See the history of this page for a list of all contributions to it.