Monoids of moduli spaces of manifolds (Q982161)

The authors study categories of cobordism from the point of view of U. Tillmann and her coauthors. In fact, the proof of the Mumford conjecture relies upon the study of a category of 2-dimensional cobordism. The proof identifies the homotopy type of the topological realization of this category together with an infinite loop space associated to a Thom spectrum. This identification uses infinite loop space theory together with differential topology techniques such as the \(h\)-principle of Gromov. An important step toward the proof of Mumford's conjecture is the identification of this infinite loop space with the classifying space of the stable mappig class group, this step needs Harer's homological stability of the complex of curves. The authors study a pointed version of these cobordism categories, this pointed version is a full subcategory. They prove a very general result about pointed cobordism categories together with \(\theta\)-structures that states that if the \(d\)-sphere is \(\theta\)-oriented then the topological realization of the category of pointed \(d\)-dimensional \(\theta\)-oriented cobordisms is homotopy equivalent to the realization of the whole category of \(d\)-dimensional \(\theta\)-oriented cobordisms. They apply this result when \(d=2\) and with the standard orientation, and they are able to identify the monoid of mapping class groups together with the realization of the category of oriented pointed \(2\)-cobordisms without using Harer's stability result; this is really a nice and impressive tour de force.