IHP Workshop on 'Higher Structures in Geometry and Physics'

The proposal is to partially support a five-day workshop on ``Higher Structures in Geometry and Physics'', to be held at the Institut Henri Poincare, Paris, France, from Jan 15 to Jan 19, 2007. The workshop is organized by PI with Alberto Cattaneo from Zurich University, Switzerland. It is part of the IHP trimester program on ``Groupoids and stacks in Physics and Geometry', where many graduate courses are offered to students and young researchers. Higher structures, in particular homotopy algebras, have appeared in many branches of mathematics and particularly in mathematical physics ranging from deformation quantization, mirror symmetry, Poisson geometry and integrable systems. The workshop aims to promote interaction between mathematicians, physicists and groups working on related areas from different aspects. It brings together leading experts and young researchers in these subjects to address the important questions.

There are many bright young people working in these subjects around the world and this workshop will be a great opportunity to bring US researchers especially young people to exchange their ideas with their international colleagues and to broaden their perspective. PI anticipates inviting many mathematicians at the postdoctoral and graduate student level (mainly from the United States, and Europe) to the workshop.