James periodicity and the EHP sequence I

Series
Geometry Topology Working Seminar
Time
Friday, September 6, 2013 - 2:00pm for 1 hour (actually 50 minutes)
Location
Skiles 006
Speaker
Kirsten Wickelgren – Georgia Tech
Organizer
John Etnyre

Please Note: Note this is a 1 hour seminar (not the usual 2 hours).

Allowing formal desuspensions of maps and objects takes the category of topological spaces to the category of spectra, where cohomology is naturally represented. The EHP spectral sequence encodes how far one can desuspend maps between spheres. It's among the most useful tools for computing homotopy groups of spheres. RP^infty has a cell structure with a cell in each dimension and with attaching maps of degrees ...020202... Note that this sequence is periodic. In fact, it is more than the degrees of these maps which are periodic and a map of Snaith relates this periodicity to the EHP sequence.We will develop the EHP sequence, James periodicity and the relationship between the two.