Models for the Maclaurin tower of a simplicial functor via a derived Yoneda embedding

Abstract

We prove that the Goodwillie tower of a weak equivalence preserving functor from spaces to spectra can be expressed in terms of the tower for stable mapping spaces. Our proof is motivated by interpreting the functors P n and D n as pseudo-differential operators which suggests certain ‘integral’ presentations based on a derived Yoneda embedding. These models allow one to extend computational tools available for the tower of stable mapping spaces. As an application we give a classical expression for the derivative over the basepoint.