Context-free manifold calculus and the Fulton-MacPherson operad (Q1954145)

Let \(M\) be a smooth manifold, \(\mathcal O(M)\) the category of its open subsets with inclusions as morphisms, and \(Top\) the category of spaces (this can in fact be replaced by any model category). Manifold calculus of functors, due to \textit{M. Weiss} [Geom. Topol. 3, 67--101 (1999); erratum ibid. 15, No. 1, 407--409 (2011; Zbl 0927.57027)] is a theory that associates to a contravariant functor \(F: \mathcal O(M)\to Top\) a certain tower of spaces/functors, called the \textit{Taylor tower of \(F\)}. The \(k\)th stage of the tower, \(T_kF\), is a functor whose value on an open set \(U\) is the homotopy limit of \(F\) over the subcategory \(\mathcal O_k(U)\) of \(\mathcal O(U)\) consisting of open subsets of \(U\) that are diffeomorphic to at most \(k\) open balls. The functor of most interest, and the motivating example for the entire manifold calculus, is \(F=\text{Emb}(M,N)\), the space of embeddings of \(M\) in \(N\) (where \(N\) is another smooth manifold). The author of the paper under review offers an alternative description of the stages \(T_k\text{Emb}(M,N)\), motivated by the connection between \(\mathcal O_k(M)\) and the little balls operad (he and G. Arone had already observed special cases of this in their study of long knots). Namely, he considers truncations of bimodules over the framed Fulton-MacPherson operad (which essentially consists of compactifications of configuration spaces of points in \(M\)) and shows that these truncations are precisely the stages \(T_k\text{Emb}(M,N)\). This turns out to be a special case of a theorem by Boavida and Weiss as it applies to the embedding functor. As a special case, the author discusses the space of embeddings modulo immersions of \(\mathbb R^m\) in \(\mathbb R^n\) and gives a presentation of the Taylor tower as the space of derived morphisms between truncated infinitesimal bimodules (this notion is due to Loday and Vallette) over little balls operads of dimensions \(m\) and \(n\).