Room P3.10, Mathematics Building

Pedro Boavida, CAMGSD, Instituto Superior Técnico, Universidade de Lisboa
Spaces of smooth embeddings and the little disks operad

I will describe a homotopy theoretic approach, based on a method due to Goodwillie and Weiss, to study spaces of smooth embeddings of a manifold into another. This approach opened up interesting relations to operad theory and as such to fundamental objects in topology (e.g. configuration spaces) and algebra (e.g. graph complexes). I will survey some of these developments, focusing on the case of long knots and higher-dimensional variants, for which these relations are the sharpest.