Topology working seminar: Maxim Stykow (UBC)

In this talk we will describe the underlying construction of the main theorem of Galatius' paper. This main theorem is a generalization of the Pontryagin-Thom construction and establishes a weak homotopy equivalence between the classifying space of a cobordism category and the infinite loop space of the spectrum MTSO(n). We then compute the rational cohomology of this infinite loop space and describe how the generalized MMM-classes come from it.