This manuscript is based on a ten hours series of seminars I delivered in August of 2003 at the Nagoya Institute of Technology as part of the workshop on homotopy theory organized by Norihiko Minami and following the Kinosaki conference in honor of Goro Nishida. One of the most striking applications of homotopy theory in “exotic” contexes is Voevodsky’s proof of the Milnor Conjecture. This conj...

The first part describes power operations in elliptic cohomology in terms of isogenies of the underlying elliptic curve. The second part discusses a relationship between equivariant elliptic cohomology and representations of loop groups. The third part investigates the representation theoretic considerations which give rise to the power operations discussed in the first part.

Algebraic topology tries to answer problems of homotopy theory by translating them into algebra, using invariants such as the homotopy or cohomology groups of a space. These invariants, even when endowed with extra algebraic structure such as Whitehead products or Steenrod operations, rarely reflect fully the original homotopical information, and the additional data needed for a full invariant ...