Haynes R. Miller - Böcker

Edward Witten once said that Elliptic Cohomology was a piece of 21st Century Mathematics that happened to fall into the 20th Century. He also likened our understanding of it to what we know of the topography of an archipelago; the peaks are beautiful and clearly connected to each other, but the exact connections are buried, as yet invisible. This very active subject has connections to algebraic topology, theoretical physics, number theory and algebraic geometry, and all these connections are represented in the sixteen papers in this volume. A variety of distinct perspectives are offered, with topics including equivariant complex elliptic cohomology, the physics of M-theory, the modular characteristics of vertex operator algebras, and higher chromatic analogues of elliptic cohomology. This is the first collection of papers on elliptic cohomology in almost twenty years and gives a broad picture of the state of the art in this important field of mathematics.

During the Winter and spring of 1985 a Workshop in Algebraic Topology was held at the University of Washington. The course notes by Emmanuel Dror Farjoun and by Frederick R. Cohen contained in this volume are carefully written graduate level expositions of certain aspects of equivariant homotopy theory and classical homotopy theory, respectively. M.E. Mahowald has included some of the material from his further papers, represent a wide range of contemporary homotopy theory: the Kervaire invariant, stable splitting theorems, computer calculation of unstable homotopy groups, and studies of L(n), Im J, and the symmetric groups.

These are proceedings of an International Conference on Algebraic Topology, held 28 July through 1 August, 1986, at Arcata, California. The conference served in part to mark the 25th anniversary of the journal Topology and 60th birthday of Edgar H. Brown. It preceded ICM 86 in Berkeley, and was conceived as a successor to the Aarhus conferences of 1978 and 1982. Some thirty papers are included in this volume, mostly at a research level. Subjects include cyclic homology, H-spaces, transformation groups, real and rational homotopy theory, acyclic manifolds, the homotopy theory of classifying spaces, instantons and loop spaces, and complex bordism.

Algebraic Topology and basic homotopy theory form a fundamental building block for much of modern mathematics. These lecture notes represent a culmination of many years of leading a two-semester course in this subject at MIT. The style is engaging and student-friendly, but precise. Every lecture is accompanied by exercises. It begins slowly in order to gather up students with a variety of backgrounds, but gains pace as the course progresses, and by the end the student has a command of all the basic techniques of classical homotopy theory.