The academic year 1996-97 was designated as a special year in Algebraic Topology at Northwestern University (Evanston, IL). In addition to guest lecturers and special courses, an international conference was held entitled "Current trends in algebraic topology with applications to algebraic geometry and physics". The series of plenary lectures included in this volume indicate the great breadth of the conference and the lively interaction that took place among various areas of mathematics. Original research papers were submitted, and all submissions were refereed to the usual journal standards.

Features:

• A paper prepared by C. Rezk on the Hopkins-Miller theorem.
• A set of problems presented at a special problem session held at the conference.

Readership

Graduate students and research mathematicians working in algebraic topology.

Table of Contents

• A. Adem -- Buildings, group extensions and the cohomology of congruence subgroups
• A. Baker -- Hecke algebras acting on elliptic cohomology
• R. R. Bruner -- Some root invariants and Steenrod operations in \(\mathrm{Ext}_A(F_2,F_2)\)
• F. R. Cohen and U. Tillmann -- Toward homology operations for mapping class groups
• O. Cornea -- Spanier-Whitehead duality and critical points
• P. Goerss -- Comparing completions of a space at a prime
• V. Gorbounov and P. Symonds -- Toward the homotopy groups of the higher real \(K\)-theory \(EO_2\)
• D. H. Gottlieb -- Skew symmetric bundle maps
• W.-H. Lin and M. Mahowald -- The Adams spectral sequence for Minami's theorem
• J. Martino and S. Priddy -- Applications of the Minami-Webb formula to splitting classifying spaces
• J. P. May -- Brave new worlds in stable homotopy theory
• R. J. Milgram and C. Overton -- The stable splitting of \(B_{M_{12}}\) and related groups
• N. Minami -- On the Kervaire invariant problem
• J. Morava -- Schur \(Q\)-functions and a Kontsevich-Witten genus
• D. Juan-Pineda -- Stable splittings of classifying spaces of amalgams of finite groups
• D. C. Ravenel -- What we still don't know about loop spaces of spheres
• N. Ray -- A topological calculus for formal power series
• C. Rezk -- Notes on the Hopkins-Miller theorem
• H. Sadofsky and W. S. Wilson -- Commutative Morava homology Hopf algebras
• Northwestern 1997 algebraic topology conference-Problems