We study the mathematical structure underlying the concept of locality which lies at the heart of classical and quantum field theory, and develop a machinery used to preserve locality during the renormalisation procedure. Viewing renormalisation in the framework of Connes and Kreimer as the algebraic Birkhoff factorisation of characters on a Hopf algebra with values in a Rota-Baxter algebra, we build locality variants of these algebraic structures, leading to a locality variant of the algebraic Birkhoff factorisation. This provides an algebraic formulation of the conservation of locality while renormalising. As an application in the context of the Euler-Maclaurin formula on lattice cones, we renormalise the exponential generating function which sums over the lattice points in a lattice cone. As a consequence, for a suitable multivariate regularisation, renormalisation from the algebraic Birkhoff factorisation amounts to composition by a projection onto holomorphic multivariate germs.

Using a global symbol calculus for pseudodifferential operators on tori, we build a canonical trace on classical pseudodifferential operators on noncommutative tori in terms of a canonical discrete sum on the underlying toroidal symbols. We characterise the canonical trace on operators on the noncommutative torus as well as its underlying canonical discrete sum on symbols of fixed (resp. any) noninteger order. On the grounds of this uniqueness result, we prove that in the commutative setup, this canonical trace on the noncommutative torus reduces to Kontsevich and Vishik's canonical trace which is thereby identified with a discrete sum. A similar characterisation for the noncommutative residue on noncommutative tori as the unique trace which vanishes on trace-class operators generalises Fathizadeh and Wong's characterisation in so far as it includes the case of operators of fixed integer order. By means of the canonical trace, we derive defect formulae for regularized traces. The conformal invariance of the $ \zeta $-function at zero of the Laplacian on the noncommutative torus is then a straightforward consequence.

We show that the residue density of the logarithm of a generalized Laplacian on a closed manifold definesan invariant polynomial-valued differential form. We express it in terms of a finite sum of residues ofclassical pseudodifferential symbols. In the case of the square of a Dirac operator, these formulas providea pedestrian proof of the Atiyah–Singer formula for a pure Dirac operator in four dimensions and for atwisted Dirac operator on a flat space of any dimension. These correspond to special cases of a moregeneral formula by Scott and Zagier. In our approach, which is of perturbative nature, we use either aCampbell–Hausdorff formula derived by Okikiolu or a noncommutative Taylor-type formula.