Following ideas of Lurie, we give a general construction of equivariant elliptic cohomology without restriction to characteristic zero. Specializing to the universal elliptic curve we obtain, in particular, equivariant spectra of topological modular forms. We compute the fixed points of these spectra for the circle group and more generally for tori.

Given a height at most two Landweber exact $\mathbb {E}_\infty$-ring $E$ whose homotopy is concentrated in even degrees, we show that any complex orientation of $E$ which satisfies the Ando criterion admits a unique lift to an $\mathbb {E}_\infty$-complex orientation $\mathrm {MU} \to E$. As a consequence, we give a short proof that the level $n$ elliptic genus lifts uniquely to an $\mathbb {E}_\infty$-complex orientation $\mathrm {MU} \to \mathrm {tmf}_1 (n)$ for all $n\, {\geq}\, 2$.

The space of Fredholm operators of fixed index is stratified by submanifolds according to the dimension of the kernel. Geometric considerations often lead to questions about the intersections of concrete families of elliptic operators with these submanifolds: Are the intersections nonempty? Are they smooth? What are their codimensions? The purpose of this article is to develop tools to address these questions in equivariant situations. An important motivation for this work are transversality questions for multiple covers of J-holomorphic maps. As an application, we use our framework to give a concise exposition of Wendl’s proof of the superrigidity conjecture.

Homotopy theory folklore tells us that the sheaf defining the cohomology theory $\operatorname {\mathrm {Tmf}}$ of topological modular forms is unique up to homotopy. Here we provide a proof of this fact, although we claim no originality for the statement. This retroactively reconciles all previous constructions of $\operatorname {\mathrm {Tmf}}$.

We construct a complex analytic version of an equivariant cohomology theory which appeared in a paper of Rezk, and which is roughly modelled on the Borel-equivariant cohomology of the double free loop space. The construction is defined on finite, torus-equivariant CW complexes and takes values in coherent holomorphic sheaves over the moduli stack of complex elliptic curves. Our methods involve an inverse limit construction over all finite-dimensional subcomplexes of the double free loop space, following an analogous construction of Kitchloo for single free loop spaces. We show that, for any given complex elliptic curve $\mathcal {C}$, the fiber of our construction over $\mathcal {C}$ is isomorphic to Grojnowski's equivariant elliptic cohomology theory associated to $\mathcal {C}$.

We calculate equivariant elliptic cohomology of the partial flag variety $\def \xmlpi #1{}\def \mathsfbi #1{\boldsymbol {\mathsf {#1}}}\let \le =\leqslant \let \leq =\leqslant \let \ge =\geqslant \let \geq =\geqslant \def \Pr {\mathit {Pr}}\def \Fr {\mathit {Fr}}\def \Rey {\mathit {Re}}G/H$, where $H\subseteq G$ are compact connected Lie groups of equal rank. We identify the ${\rm RO}(G)$-graded coefficients ${\mathcal{E}} ll_G^*$ as powers of Looijenga’s line bundle and prove that transfer along the map

$$\begin{equation*} \pi \,{:}\,G/H\longrightarrow {\rm pt} \end{equation*}$$

$K$

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.