The Classifying Spaces for Surgery and Cobordism of Manifolds

Book excerpt: Beginning with a general discussion of bordism, Professors Madsen and Milgram present the homotopy theory of the surgery classifying spaces and the classifying spaces for the various required bundle theories. The next part covers more recent work on the maps between these spaces and the properties of the PL and Top characteristic classes, and includes integrality theorems for topological and PL manifolds. Later chapters treat the integral cohomology of BPL and Btop. The authors conclude with a discussion of the PL and topological cobordism rings and a construction of the torsion-free generators.