Gregory Arone (University of Aberdeen)
arone@maths.abdn.ac.uk
Calculus of functors is a general method for studying important spaces that arise in topology. We will apply this method to study spaces of embeddings of manifolds. In this context, the idea is to consider the space of embeddings as a functor of two variables, and to exploit the functoriality. One then can develop notions such as derivatives, Taylor approximations and so forth. We will see how this approach recovers, and generalizes, some classical results on embeddings.