Mod 2 exterior H-spaces (Q1059301)

In the early 1960s P. E. Thomas established what at the time were regarded as remarkable results on the action of the Steenrod algebra on the cohomology of a simply connected finite H-space, usually under the key hypothesis that the mod 2 cohomology was primitively generated. Given this last hypothesis and the assumption that the integral homology was free of 2-torsion, it followed that the first non vanishing homotopy group occurs in degree 3 or 7. In this paper the author establishes this result without the primitivity assumption. This is part of the author's major programme of establishing as far as possible Thomas's results without this assumption using higher order cohomology operations rather than Stasheff's projective plane. In this paper the c-invariant plays a major role and so, more surprisingly, does the projective plane.