EVENT DETAILS AND ABSTRACT

Title: Exotic Spheres via Topological Modular Forms
Speaker: Mark Behrens
Speaker Info: MIT
Brief Description:
Special Note:
Abstract:

In response to a question of Milnor, a collaboration of Mike Hill, Mike Hopkins, Mark Mahowald, and myself have been attempting to determine in which dimensions exotic spheres exist. We will review the work of Kervaire-Milnor, which reduces the problem to questions in the stable homotopy groups of spheres. Thanks to the solution of the Kervaire invariant one problem, the problem is reduced to producing certain infinite families in the stable stems. This motivated Mahowald and I to completely determine the Hurewicz image of TMF. The plethora of 192 periodic families that result partially answer the exotic spheres question.