Prehistory:
I got my PhD in 1996 from MIT in the subject of deformation quantization.
My advisor at MIT was  Ezra Getzler. Also Boris Tsygan was my informal advisor.
As a postdoc  I enjoyed a fruitful scientific atmosphere at IHES very much.
Then I left for Strasbourg to work in the group of Jean-Louis Loday:

• working group 97-98  on algebraic structures in differential geometry
• working group 98-99  on algebraic and topological structures up-to homotopy.

     I wrote a couple of reaserch  proposals:

• proposal-98 on Batalin-Vilkovisky and Leibniz algebras in differential geometry
• proposal-99 on Maurer-Cartan equations and structures up-to homotopy.

Prehistory comes here to a full . *


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* see "1066 And All That" by W.C.Sellar and R.J.Yeatman