Back-to-School seminar: Computing bordism rings with homotopy theory

Structured bordism classes of manifolds form a ring—but which ring? In this talk, we will see how answering this question is actually a homotopical problem. The process of translation from geometric topology to homotopy theory is as exciting as the final result: our M.O. will be a tour of classifying spaces, Thom spectra, and many, many pairs of pants.