Everybody having even the slightest interest in analytical mechanics remembers having met there the Poisson bracket of two functions of 2n variables (pi, qi) f g ~(8f8g 8 8 ) (0.1) {f,g} = L... ~[ji - [ji~ , ;=1 p, q q p, and the fundamental role it plays in that field. In modern works, this bracket is derived from a symplectic structure, and it appears as one of the main in­ gredients of symplectic manifolds. In fact, it can even be taken as the defining clement of the structure (e.g., [TIl]). But, the study of some mechanical sys­ tems, particularly systems with symmetry groups or constraints, may lead to more general Poisson brackets. Therefore, it was natural to define a mathematical structure where the notion of a Poisson bracket would be the primary notion of the theory, and, from this viewpoint, such a theory has been developed since the early 19708, by A. Lichnerowicz, A. Weinstein, and many other authors (see the references at the end of the book). But, it has been remarked by Weinstein [We3] that, in fact, the theory can be traced back to S. Lie himself [Lie].

0 Introduction.- 1 The Poisson bivector and the Schouten-Nijenhuis bracket.- 1.1 The Poisson bivector.- 1.2 The Schouten-Nijenhuis bracket.- 1.3 Coordinate expressions.- 1.4 The Koszul formula and applications.- 1.5 Miscellanea.- 2 The symplectic foliation of a Poisson manifold.- 2.1 General distributions and foliations.- 2.2 Involutivity and integrability.- 2.3 The case of Poisson manifolds.- 3 Examples of Poisson manifolds.- 3.1 Structures on ?n. Lie-Poisson structures.- 3.2 Dirac brackets.- 3.3 Further examples.- 4 Poisson calculus.- 4.1 The bracket of 1-forms.- 4.2 The contravariant exterior differentiations.- 4.3 The regular case.- 4.4 Cofoliations.- 4.5 Contravariant derivatives on vector bundles.- 4.6 More brackets.- 5 Poisson cohomology.- 5.1 Definition and general properties.- 5.2 Straightforward and inductive computations.- 5.3 The spectral sequence of Poisson cohomology.- 5.4 Poisson homology.- 6 An introduction to quantization.- 6.1 Prequantization.- 6.2 Quantization.- 6.3 Prequantization representations.- 6.4 Deformation quantization.- 7 Poisson morphisms, coinduced structures, reduction.- 7.1 Properties of Poisson mappings.- 7.2 Reduction of Poisson structures.- 7.3 Group actions and momenta.- 7.4 Group actions and reduction.- 8 Symplectic realizations of Poisson manifolds.- 8.1 Local symplectic realizations.- 8.2 Dual pairs of Poisson manifolds.- 8.3 Isotropic realizations.- 8.4 Isotropic realizations and nets.- 9 Realizations of Poisson manifolds by symplectic groupoids.- 9.1 Realizations of Lie-Poisson structures.- 9.2 The Lie groupoid and symplectic structures of T*G.- 9.3 General symplectic groupoids.- 9.4 Lie algebroids and the integrability of Poisson manifolds.- 9.5 Further integrability results.- 10 Poisson-Lie groups.- 10.1 Poisson-Lie andbiinvariant structures on Lie groups.- 10.2 Characteristic properties of Poisson-Lie groups.- 10.3 The Lie algebra of a Poisson-Lie group.- 10.4 The Yang-Baxter equations.- 10.5 Manin triples.- 10.6 Actions and dressing transformations.- References.