  Courant algebroids are structures which include as examples the doubles of
Lie bialgebras and the direct sum of tangent and cotangent bundles with the
bracket introduced by T. Courant for the study of Dirac structures. Within the
category of Courant algebroids one can construct the doubles of Lie
bialgebroids, the infinitesimal objects for Poisson groupoids. We show that
Courant algebroids can be considered as strongly homotopy Lie algebras.
