Kervaire Invariant One [after M. A. Hill, M. J. Hopkins, and D. C. Ravenel]

Abstract

The question of when the Kervaire invariant is nontrivial was the only question left unresolved by Kervaire and Milnor in their 1963 study of the relationship between groups of homotopy spheres and stable homotopy groups. In 2009, Mike Hill, Mike Hopkins, and Doug Ravenel resolved this question except in one dimension, by a highly innovative attack using large amounts of equivariant stable homotopy theory and small amounts of computation. The present paper is a Seminaire Bourbaki report on this work.