No label defined (Q4418786)

At the ICM talk in Zürich [Proceedings of the International Congress of Mathematicians, vol. I (Zürich 1994) (Basel), Birkhäuser, 554-565 (1995; Zbl 0848.55002)], the author presented a program which relates invariants of manifolds, homotopy groups of spheres and ordinary modular forms. The article in hand describes the recent progress made by the topological modular forms spectrum \(tmf\) and announces the completion of the program. The reader is first made familiar with the basics of stable homotopy theory like spectra, their relations to formal group laws and the Adams spectral sequence. The topological modular forms are motivated and their relations to ordinary modular forms are described. The construction of \(tmf\) is claimed but not given here. It follows a topological and an analytic proof of a congruence of \textit{R. E. Borcherds} [Invent. Math. 120, 161-213 (1995; Zbl 0932.11028)]. It exemplifies how topological modular forms lead to an understanding of both algebraic topology and modular forms. The last part is devoted to cobordism invariants. The construction of \(E_\infty\) maps from the Thom spectrum \(MO\langle 8\rangle\) to \(tmf\) is reduced to an ordinary factorization problem with the help of the spectrum \(gl_1 (tmf)\). A complete description of the space of all \(E_\infty\) maps is stated and the Atkin operator is located into the topological framework. For the entire collection see [Zbl 1011.00026].