Paul Kruse (UNC-CH), GMA Seminar

Title: An introduction to Cobordism.

Abstract: The classification of manifolds has long been an active area of research. One of the many techniques developed was cobordism, first introduced by Poincare.  Pontrjagin and Thom then connected this to the stable homotopy problem.  In the first half of this talk, I will introduce the idea of a cobordism category.  In the second half, I will describe the link between the cobordism problem and the stable homotopy problem.