A walk in the noncommutative garden

This text is written for the volume of the school/conference "Noncommutative Geometry 2005" held at IPM Tehran. It gives a survey of methods and results in noncommutative geometry, based on a discussion of significant examples of noncommutative spaces in geometry, number theory, and physics. The paper also contains an outline (the ``Tehran program'') of ongoing joint work with Consani on the noncommutative geometry of the adeles class space and its relation to number theoretic questions.Comment: 106 pages, LaTeX, 23 figure

Dyson-Schwinger equations in the theory of computation

Following Manin's approach to renormalization in the theory of computation, we investigate Dyson-Schwinger equations on Hopf algebras, operads and properads of flow charts, as a way of encoding self-similarity structures in the theory of algorithms computing primitive and partial recursive functions and in the halting problem.Comment: 26 pages, LaTeX, final version, in "Feynman Amplitudes, Periods and Motives", Contemporary Mathematics, AMS 201

Algebraic Principles for Rely-Guarantee Style Concurrency Verification Tools

We provide simple equational principles for deriving rely-guarantee-style inference rules and refinement laws based on idempotent semirings. We link the algebraic layer with concrete models of programs based on languages and execution traces. We have implemented the approach in Isabelle/HOL as a lightweight concurrency verification tool that supports reasoning about the control and data flow of concurrent programs with shared variables at different levels of abstraction. This is illustrated on two simple verification examples

Elliptic Operators and Higher Signatures

Building on the theory of elliptic operators, we give a unified treatment of the following topics: - the problem of homotopy invariance of Novikov's higher signatures on closed manifolds; - the problem of cut-and-paste invariance of Novikov's higher signatures on closed manifolds; - the problem of defining higher signatures on manifolds with boundary and proving their homotopy invariance.Comment: 54 pages. Survey-article. Related papers can be retrieved from http://www.mat.uniroma1.it/people/piazz

Toward a fundamental groupoid for the stable homotopy category

This very speculative sketch suggests that a theory of fundamental groupoids for tensor triangulated categories could be used to describe the ring of integers as the singular fiber in a family of ring-spectra parametrized by a structure space for the stable homotopy category, and that Bousfield localization might be part of a theory of `nearby' cycles for stacks or orbifolds.Comment: This is the version published by Geometry & Topology Monographs on 18 April 200

Feynman integrals and motives

This article gives an overview of recent results on the relation between quantum field theory and motives, with an emphasis on two different approaches: a "bottom-up" approach based on the algebraic geometry of varieties associated to Feynman graphs, and a "top-down" approach based on the comparison of the properties of associated categorical structures. This survey is mostly based on joint work of the author with Paolo Aluffi, along the lines of the first approach, and on previous work of the author with Alain Connes on the second approach.Comment: 32 pages LaTeX, 3 figures, to appear in the Proceedings of the 5th European Congress of Mathematic