Bücher von Douglas C. Ravenel

This is the definitive account of the resolution of the Kervaire invariant problem, a major milestone in algebraic topology. It develops all the machinery that is needed for the proof, and details many explicit constructions and computations performed along the way, making it suitable for graduate students as well as experts in homotopy theory.

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.

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.

Nilpotence and Periodicity in Stable Homotopy Theory describes some major advances made in algebraic topology in recent years, centering on the nilpotence and periodicity theorems, which were conjectured by the author in 1977 and proved by Devinatz, Hopkins, and Smith in 1985. During the last ten years a number of significant advances have been made in homotopy theory, and this book fills a real need for an up-to-date text on that topic. Ravenel's first few chapters are written with a general mathematical audience in mind. They survey both the ideas that lead up to the theorems and their applications to homotopy theory. The book begins with some elementary concepts of homotopy theory that are needed to state the problem. This includes such notions as homotopy, homotopy equivalence, CW-complex, and suspension. Next the machinery of complex cobordism, Morava K-theory, and formal group laws in characteristic p are introduced. The latter portion of the book provides specialists with a coherent and rigorous account of the proofs. It includes hitherto unpublished material on the smash product and chromatic convergence theorems and on modular representations of the symmetric group.