Title: An algebraic analog of the Virasoro group

Author: Jack Morava

AMS classification: 81R10, 55S25

Address: The Johns Hopkins University
Baltimore 21218 Maryland

e-mail: jack@math.jhu.edu

Abstract:
The group of diffeomorphisms of a circle is not
an infinite-dimensional algebraic group, though in many ways it 
behaves as if it were. Here we construct an algebraic model for this
object, and discuss some of its representations, which appear 
in the Kontsevich-Witten theory of two-dimensional topological 
gravity through the homotopy theory of moduli spaces. 

This is a version of a talk on 23 June 2001 at the Prague Conference 
on Quantum Groups and Integrable Systems, published in the Czechoslovak
J. Physics 51 (2001).