Courant Algebroids. A Short History

Abstract

The search for a geometric interpretation of the constrained brackets of Dirac led to the definition of the Courant bracket. The search for the right notion of a ''double'' for Lie bialgebroids led to the definition of Courant algebroids. We recount the emergence of these concepts.

Keywords

• Courant algebroid
• Dorfman bracket
• Lie algebroid
• Lie bialgebroid
• generalized geometry
• Dirac structure
• Loday algebra
• Leibniz algebra
• derived bracket