Hopf Cyclic Cohomology, Characteristic Classes of Foliations, and Quantum Invariant of Knots.

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Noncommutative Geometry (NCG) is an area of mathematics which applies algebras, including non-commutative ones, in solving geometric problems. Expressions in non-commutative algebras are sensitive to the order of their elements. For example, if you shuffle a deck of cards and then cut it, the result is not the same if you cut it and then shuffle it. Manifolds look locally like points, lines, planes, etc. For example, balloons and tire tubes are manifolds of dimension 2 because you may construct them by stitching together a few plane-like pieces. On the other hand, a non commutative manifold usually comes with two parts which are a manifold and a relation on it that identifies some of its points. It is obvious that any manifold is a non-commutative one but not vice versa. A foliation on a manifold slices it into manifolds with a lower dimension. For example, an onion which is a three dimensional manifold is decomposed into its leaves which are all sphere-like and hence two dimensional. Similarly a cabbage is also decomposed into its leaves. Mathematically, onion and cabbage are the same but their foliations are not equal. By identifying all points of each leaf we obtain a non-commutative manifold. Foliations have applications in many areas of mathematics and physics. Study of foliations is very old and their characterization has been open since 1960s. There have been different theories applied in this area with partial successes. However there are still many fundamental open problems. We plan to solve these open problems via methods of non-commutative geometry. Our primary tools are Hopf algebras and Hopf cyclic cohomology. Hopf algebras are the non-commutative counterpart of symmetries. Hopf cyclic cohomology defines invariants for symmetric non-commutative manifolds.