Quillen's work on formal group laws and complex cobordism theory

Abstract

In 1969 Quillen discovered a deep connection between complex cobordism and formal group laws which he announced in [Qui69]. Algebraic topology has never been the same since. We will describe the content of [Qui69] and then discuss its impact on the field. This paper is a writeup of a talk on the same topic given at the Quillen Conference at MIT in October 2012. Slides for that talk are available on the author's home page.