Subject: bordism reference
Date: Fri, 09 Apr 2004 08:35:38 -0400 (EDT)
From: Jack Morava <jack@math.jhu.edu>
To: Don Davis <dmd1@lehigh.edu>

Dear Don,

Quillen's `Elementary proofs of some results of cobordism theory
using Steenrod operations', Adv. in Math. 7 (1971) 29 - 56 is a
kind of benchmark. It's essentially selfcontained, and takes
a very elegant (bivariant) point of view which has been picked up
more recently, for example, in the work of Levine and Morel on
analogs of cobordism in algebraic geometry.

It's pretty much a concise course in geometric algebraic topology
all by itself. I guess it assumes a certain amount of transversality
theory, but good accounts of that are now available in textbooks, eg
Guillemin and Pollack's Differential Topology.

I like Conner and Floyd a lot, especially the first chapter or so,
which supplements Quillen nicely; it was a masterpiece too, in its
day. But Quillen's twenty-some-odd page paper is like a harpoon to
the heart of algebraic topology.

> -----Original Message-----
>
> Subject: query
> Date: Wed, 31 Mar 2004 16:49:52 -0500 (EST)
> From: James Stasheff <jds@math.upenn.edu>
>
> What is the best, gentle intro to bordism theory?
> for someone who knows some hotopy theory but is basically an algebraic
> geometer?
> thanks
>
>         Jim Stasheff            jds@math.upenn.edu
>
>
>