English

How to discretize the differential forms on the interval

Quantum Algebra 2016-09-09 v2 Algebraic Topology

Abstract

We provide explicit quasi-isomorphisms between the following three algebraic structures associated to the unit interval: i) the commutative dg algebra of differential forms, ii) the non-commutative dg algebra of simplicial cochains and iii) the Whitney forms, equipped with a homotopy commutative and homotopy associative, i.e. CC_\infty, algebra structure. Our main interest lies in a natural `discretization' CC_\infty quasi-isomorphism φ\varphi from differential forms to Whitney forms. We establish a uniqueness result that implies that φ\varphi coincides with the morphism from homotopy transfer, and obtain several explicit formulas for φ\varphi, all of which are related to the Magnus expansion. In particular, we recover combinatorial formulas for the Magnus expansion due to Mielnik and Pleba\'nski.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1607.03654,
  title  = {How to discretize the differential forms on the interval},
  author = {Ruggero Bandiera and Florian Schaetz},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1607.03654},
  year   = {2016}
}

Comments

29 pages, extended abstract, typos fixed

R2 v1 2026-06-22T14:53:17.359Z