Group cohomology has a rich history that goes back a century or more. Its origins are rooted in investigations of group theory and num ber theory, and it grew into an integral component of algebraic topology. In the last thirty years, group cohomology has developed a powerful con nection with finite group representations. Unlike the early applications which were primarily concerned with cohomology in low degrees, the in teractions with representation theory involve cohomology rings and the geometry of spectra over these rings. It is this connection to represen tation theory that we take as our primary motivation for this book. The book consists of two separate pieces. Chronologically, the first part was the computer calculations of the mod-2 cohomology rings of the groups whose orders divide 64. The ideas and the programs for the calculations were developed over the last 10 years. Several new features were added over the course of that time. We had originally planned to include only a brief introduction to the calculations. However, we were persuaded to produce a more substantial text that would include in greater detail the concepts that are the subject of the calculations and are the source of some of the motivating conjectures for the com putations. We have gathered together many of the results and ideas that are the focus of the calculations from throughout the mathematical literature.

The seminar focuses on a recent solution, by the authors, of a long standing problem concerning the stable module category (of not necessarily finite dimensional representations) of a finite group. The proof draws on ideas from commutative algebra, cohomology of groups, and stable homotopy theory. The unifying theme is a notion of support which provides a geometric approach for studying various algebraic structures. The prototype for this has been Daniel Quillen’s description of the algebraic variety corresponding to the cohomology ring of a finite group, based on which Jon Carlson introduced support varieties for modular representations. This has made it possible to apply methods of algebraic geometry to obtain representation theoretic information. Their work has inspired the development of analogous theories in various contexts, notably modules over commutative complete intersection rings and over cocommutative Hopf algebras. One of the threads in this development has been the classification of thick or localizing subcategories of various triangulated categories of representations. This story started with Mike Hopkins’ classification of thick subcategories of the perfect complexes over a commutative Noetherian ring, followed by a classification of localizing subcategories of its full derived category, due to Amnon Neeman. The authors have been developing an approach to address such classification problems, based on a construction of local cohomology functors and support for triangulated categories with ring of operators. The book serves as an introduction to this circle of ideas.

The cohomology of groups has, since its beginnings in the 1920s and 1930s, been the stage for significant interaction between algebra and topology and has led to the creation of important new fields in mathematics, like homological algebra and algebraic K-theory. This is the first book to deal comprehensively with the cohomology of finite groups: it introduces the most important and useful algebraic and topological techniques, and describes the interplay of the subject with those of homotopy theory, representation theory and group actions. The combination of theory and examples, together with the techniques for computing the cohomology of important classes of groups including symmetric groups, alternating groups, finite groups of Lie type, and some of the sporadic simple groups, enable readers to acquire an in-depth understanding of group cohomology and its extensive applications.