Formal group laws

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....

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 $S^1$)....