The road to Morava K-theory

It has been some time since we studied at the correlation between formal group laws, which were certain power series that looked like Taylor expansion of multiplication on a Lie group, and complex oriented cohomology theories. In particular, we learned that these two completely separate notions had a common universal object. The universal formal group law over the Lazard ring was the same as the formal group law determined by the universal complex oriented cohomology theory — complex cobordism cohomology....

Over the holidays sadly Edgar H. Brown passed away. He was one of the influential men behind many of the concepts this blog has featured and will feature in the future. This post is in particular focused on one of these concepts, namely Brown-Peterson cohomology and the Brown-Peterson spectrum. In the last post we developed the category of $p$-local spectra, and in the post before that we explored complex cobordism cohomology....

In the next couple years I will need to understand the ins and outs of different cohomology theories and the spectra that represents them. Some of the most important of these (for my research) can be described using $MU$ — the complex cobordism spectrum. We briefly met this spectrum — or at least its cohomology theory — when we discussed formal group laws. There we explained briefly a theorem of Quillen, stating that the universal formal group law over the Lazard ring corresponds to complex cobordism cohomology....

Recently we have covered a lot of heavy topology and abstract mathematics, so today I thought we would cover something else — something maybe a bit easier to grasp. We will introduce the concept of formal group laws, and a bit on why they are interesting. Introduction and definition To not just spew out the definition straight away, we look at a situation where formal group laws arise very naturally. Let $G$ be a one-dimensional commutative Lie group (Think here of the real numbers $\mathbb{R}$ or the circle group $S^1$)....

Even though this blog is not centered around a specific topic, we have during the last year looked more frequently at certain topics than others, such as (co)homology theory, homotopy theory and category theory. We will continue this trend today as we will try to find a solid reason for a particular object to exist. These objects were briefly mentioned in the earlier post on tensor triangulated categories, namely spectra. These objects are hugely important to the field of algebraic topology, one reason being that they are intimately linked to cohomology....