English

Higher Homotopy Hopf Algebras Found: A Ten Year Retrospective

Algebraic Topology 2010-12-07 v5

Abstract

The search for higher homotopy Hopf algebras (known today as A_\infty-bialgebras) began in 1996 during a conference at Vassar College honoring Jim Stasheff in the year of his 60th birthday. In a talk entitled "In Search of Higher Homotopy Hopf Algebras", I indicated that a DG Hopf algebra could be thought of as some (unknown) higher homotopy structure with trivial higher order structure and deformed using a graded version of Gerstenhaber and Schack's bialgebra deformation theory. In retrospect, the bi(co)module structure encoded in Gerstenhaber and Schack's differential defining deformation cohomology detects some (but not all) of the A_infty-bialgebra structure relations. Nevertheless, this motivated the discovery of A_infty-bialgebras by S. Saneblidze and myself in 2005.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.0709.3436,
  title  = {Higher Homotopy Hopf Algebras Found: A Ten Year Retrospective},
  author = {Ronald N. Umble},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:0709.3436},
  year   = {2010}
}

Comments

17 pages; 7 figures; this revision cleans up the bibliography and replaces the term "matrahedron" with "biassociahedron"