Spectra

For the last few posts we have covered some theory surrounding cohomology theories, and today we want to do something else, namely again look at some homotopy theory. It’s been a long time since we have covered homotopy groups, but today we return once again. In particular I want to cover a theorem and its consequences — the Freudenthal suspension theorem. This is one of the central theorems in the homotopy theory of topological spaces, and is one of the more important theorems we left out from the fibration series....

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....