We give a popular introduction to formality theorems for Hochschild complexes and their applications. We review some of the recent results and prove that the truncated Hochschild cochain complex of a polynomial algebra is non-formal.
The formality theorem for Hochschild chains of the algebra of functions on a smooth manifold gives us a version of the trace density map from the zeroth Hochschild homology of a deformation quantization algebra to the zeroth Poisson homology. We prop
ose a version of the algebraic index theorem for a Poisson manifold which is based on this trace density map.
