With hundreds of worked examples, exercises and illustrations, this detailed exposition of the theory of Vassiliev knot invariants opens the field to students with little or no knowledge in this area. It also serves as a guide to more advanced material. The book begins with a basic and informal introduction to knot theory, giving many examples of knot invariants before the class of Vassiliev invariants is introduced. This is followed by a detailed study of the algebras of Jacobi diagrams and 3-graphs, and the construction of functions on these algebras via Lie algebras. The authors then describe two constructions of a universal invariant with values in the algebra of Jacobi diagrams: via iterated integrals and via the Drinfeld associator, and extend the theory to framed knots. Various other topics are then discussed, such as Gauss diagram formulae, before the book ends with Vassiliev's original construction.

Abstract. We describe the general non-associative version of Lie theory that relates unital formal multiplications (formal loops), Sabinin algebras and non-associative bialgebras.Starting with a formal multiplication we construct a non-associative bialgebra, namely, the bialgebra of distributions with the convolution product. Considering the primitive elements in this bialgebra gives a functor from formal loops to Sabinin algebras. We compare this functor to that of Mikheev and Sabinin and show that although the brackets given by both constructions coincide, the multioperator does not. We also show how identities in loops produce identities in bialgebras. While associativity in loops translates into associativity in algebras, other loop identities (such as the Moufang identity) produce new algebra identities. Finally, we define a class of unital formal multiplications for which Ado's theorem holds and give examples of formal loops outside this class.A by-product of the constructions of this paper is a new identity on Bernoulli numbers. We give two proofs: one coming from the formula for the non-associative logarithm, and the other (due to D. Zagier) using generating functions.

It is shown that Segal's theorem on the spaces of rational maps from CP 1 to CP n can be extended to the spaces of continuous rational maps from CP m to CP n for any m n. The tools are the Stone-Weierstrass theorem and Vassiliev's machinery of simplicial resolutions.