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 $n\, {\geq}\, 2$.

John Rognes developed a notion of Galois extension of commutative ring spectra, and this includes a criterion for identifying an extension as unramified. Ramification for commutative ring spectra can be detected by relative topological Hochschild homology and by topological André–Quillen homology. In the classical algebraic context, it is important to distinguish between tame and wild ramification. Noether’s theorem characterizes tame ramification in terms of a normal basis, and tame ramification can also be detected via the surjectivity of the trace map. For commutative ring spectra, we suggest to study the Tate construction as a suitable analog. It tells us at which integral primes there is tame or wild ramification, and we determine its homotopy type in examples in the context of topological K-theory and topological modular forms.

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 $\operatorname {\mathrm {Tmf}}$.

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.