In 1989-90 the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute conducted a program on Algebraic Topology and its Applications. The main areas of concentration were homotopy theory, K-theory, and applications to geometric topology, gauge theory, and moduli spaces. Workshops were conducted in these three areas. This volume consists of invited, expository articles on the topics studied during this program. They describe recent advances and point to possible new directions. They should prove to be useful references for researchers in Algebraic Topology and related fields, as well as to graduate students.

During 1991-1992, Northwestern University conducted a special emphasis year on the topic, "The connections between topology and representation theory." Activities over the year culminated in a conference in May 1992 which attracted over 120 participants. Most of the plenary lectures at the conference were expository and designed to introduce current trends to graduate students and nonspecialists familiar with algebraic topology. This volume contains refereed papers presented or solicited at the conference; one paper is based on a seminar given during the emphasis year.

This book is a foundational piece of work in stable homotopy theory and in the theory of transformation groups. It may be roughly divided into two parts. The first part deals with foundations of (equivariant) stable homotopy theory. A workable category of CW-spectra is developed. The foundations are such that an action of a compact Lie group is considered throughout, and spectra allow desuspension by arbitrary representations. But even if the reader forgets about group actions, he will find many details of the theory worked out for the first time. More subtle constructions like smash products, function spectra, change of group isomorphisms, fixed point and orbit spectra are treated. While it is impossible to survey properly the material which is covered in the book, it does boast these general features: (i) a thorough and reliable presentation of the foundations of the theory; (ii) a large number of basic results, principal applications, and fundamental techniques presented for the first time in a coherent theory, unifying numerous treatments of special cases in the literature.

Nilpotence and Periodicity in Stable Homotopy Theory describes some major advances made in algebraic topology in recent years, centering on the nilpotence and periodicity theorems, which were conjectured by the author in 1977 and proved by Devinatz, Hopkins, and Smith in 1985. During the last ten years a number of significant advances have been made in homotopy theory, and this book fills a real need for an up-to-date text on that topic. Ravenel's first few chapters are written with a general mathematical audience in mind. They survey both the ideas that lead up to the theorems and their applications to homotopy theory. The book begins with some elementary concepts of homotopy theory that are needed to state the problem. This includes such notions as homotopy, homotopy equivalence, CW-complex, and suspension. Next the machinery of complex cobordism, Morava K-theory, and formal group laws in characteristic p are introduced. The latter portion of the book provides specialists with a coherent and rigorous account of the proofs. It includes hitherto unpublished material on the smash product and chromatic convergence theorems and on modular representations of the symmetric group.

This volume introduces equivariant homotopy, homology, and cohomology theory, along with various related topics in modern algebraic topology. It explains the main ideas behind some of the most striking recent advances in the subject. The works begins with a development of the equivariant algebraic topology of spaces culminating in a discussion of the Sullivan conjecture that emphasizes its relationship with classical Smith theory. The book then introduces equivariant stable homotopy theory, the equivariant stable homotopy category, and the most important examples of equivariant cohomology theories. The basic machinery that is needed to make serious use of equivariant stable homotopy theory is presented next, along with discussions of the Segal conjecture and generalized Tate cohomology. Finally, the book gives an introduction to "brave new algebra", the study of point-set level algebraic structures on spectra and its equivariant applications. Emphasis is placed on equivariant complex cobordism, and related results on that topic are presented in detail.