Functorial Knot Theory: Categories of Tangles, Coherence, Categorical Deformations, and Topological Invariants

This book begins with a detailed exposition of the key ideas in the discovery of monoidal categories of tangles as central objects of study in low-dimensional topology. The focus then turns to the deformation theory of monoidal categories and the related deformation theory of monoidal functors, which is a proper generalization of Gerstenhaber's deformation theory of associative algebras. These serve as the building blocks for a deformation theory of braided monoidal categories which gives rise to sequences of Vassiliev invariants of framed links, and clarify their interrelations.