Siddhartha Sahi, Rutgers University

``Kontsevich's deformation quantization and invariant differential operators''

April 15, 1999

In recent work, M. Kontsevich has conjectured and proved a remarkable ``formality'' result for the differential graded Lie algebra of polydifferential operators on a smooth manifold. We shall describe an application of this result to two classical problems in Lie theory:
  1. Lifting an invariant eigendistribution from a Lie algebra to a Lie group
  2. Local solvability of bi-invariant differential operators on a Lie group