Midwest Topology Seminar

The spring meeting of the Midwest Topology Seminar will be held at the University of Chicago on April 2-3, 2011, in Ryerson 251. This Midwest Topology Seminar is organized in conjunction with the Namboodiri lectures.

Namboodiri Lectures
Speaker: Doug Ravenel (University of Rochester)
April 1 at 4:00pm, April 4 at 4:00pm and April 5 at 4:30pm.
Title: The Arf-Kervaire invariant problem in algebraic topology.
Abstract: In 2009 Mike Hill, Mike Hopkins and I solved the Kervaire invariant problem in stable homotopy theory. In the first talk I will describe the history of the problem beginning with Pontryagin's work on the homotopy groups of spheres in the 1930s and Kervaire-Milnor's work on exotic spheres in the 1960s. In the second and third talks I will outline a portion of our proof.

Please let us know if you are going to attend so we can plan properly.

Schedule

Here is the schedule with abstracts.

Saturday April 2

8:45 - 9:30	Coffee
9:30 - 10:30	Benson Farb (University of Chicago) Representation Theory and Homological Stability
11:00 - 12:00	Bjørn Dundas (University of Bergen) Fixed points of smash powers of commutative ring spectra
12:00 - 1:30	Lunch break
1:30 - 2:30	Gonçalo Tabuada (University of Lisbon) The fundamental theorem via derived Morita invariance, localization, and A1-homotopy invariance
2:30 - 3:00	Coffee
3:00- 4:00	Jim McClure (Purdue University) The Ranicki orientation of STop bundles is an E∞ ring map
4:30- 5:30	Chris Schommer-Pries (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) Dualizability and Locality in 3D Topological Field Theory

Sunday April 3

8:45 - 9:30	Coffee
9:30 - 10:30	Vesna Stojanoska (Northwestern) Duality and Topological Modular Forms
11:00 - 12:00	Stefan Stolz (Notre Dame) Equivariant deRham cohomology via gauged field theories
12:00 - 1:30	Lunch break
1:30 - 2:30	Paul Goerss (Northwestern) On the chromatic splitting conjecture
2:45 - 3:45	Bertrand Guillou (University of Illinois) G-spectra are spectral Mackey functors

Lodging
We have reserved a block of rooms at the Ramada Inn 773-288-5800 for Friday and Saturday nights.  Mention the "Midwest Topology Seminar" when making a reservation.  Rooms will be held until March 1. 

Travel
The local airports are Midway (MDW) and O'Hare (ORD), with Midway being the closest one.

Financial Support
Some limited funds are available to support travel costs of participants, especially for graduate students and junior faculty without other support.  Please write to Vigleik Angeltveit (vigleik@math.uchicago.edu) to request funding.

Organizers
Peter May (may@math.uchicago.edu)
Vigleik Angeltveit (vigleik@math.uchicago.edu)
Angélica Osorno (aosorno@math.uchicago.edu)

Please contact any of us with questions.