This volume contains papers presented at the meeting , held in Ascona, June 17-21, 1996. The contents touch upon many frontier domains of modern mathematics, mathematical physics and theoretical physics and include authoritative, state-of-the-art contributions by leading scientists. New and important developments in the fields of symplectic geometry, deformation quantization, noncommutative geometry (NCG) and Lie theory are presented. Among the subjects treated are: quantization of general Poisson manifolds; new deformations needed for the quantization of Nambu mechanics; quantization of intersection cardinalities; quantum shuffles; new types of quantum groups and applications; quantum cohomology; strong homotopy Lie algebras; finite- and infinite-dimensional Lie groups; and 2D field theories and applications of NCG to gravity coupled with the standard model. This book will be of interest to researchers and post-graduate students of mathematical physics, global analysis, analysis on manifolds, topological groups, nonassociative rings and algebras, and Lie algebras. weiterlesen