Download or read book Braids and Self-Distributivity written by Patrick Dehornoy and published by Birkhäuser. This book was released on 2012-12-06 with total page 637 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the award-winning monograph of the Sunyer i Balaguer Prize 1999. The book presents recently discovered connections between Artin’s braid groups and left self-distributive systems, which are sets equipped with a binary operation satisfying the identity x(yz) = (xy)(xz). Although not a comprehensive course, the exposition is self-contained, and many basic results are established. In particular, the first chapters include a thorough algebraic study of Artin’s braid groups.