Topology Seminar: Alejandro Adem

In this talk we will define a space built out of all the commuting n-tuples in a Lie group and discuss its role as a classifying space for commutativity. Applied to the unitary groups this gives rise to an infinite loop space and the notion of commutative K-theory. We will also provide computations for the rational cohomology in terms of mult-symmetric invariants. This is joint work with Jose Gomez.