Transversality and framed cobordism

Abstract

Ren\'e Thom's remarkable and far-reaching concept of transversality has found numerous powerful applications. Most importantly, it allowed Thom to develop cobordism theory, which led to a piercing insight into the topology of smooth manifolds, when he generalized Lev Pontryagin's earlier concept of framed cobordism. For his profound findings, in 1958 he was awarded the Fields Medal. The present paper provides a down-to-earth approach to transversality theory which only assumes basic knowledge about smooth manifolds. Following an idea of Andrew Putman, we then use transversality to give a novel and detailed proof of an isomorphism theorem of Pontryagin about homotopy groups of spheres whose original proof is generally believed to be rather hard to access.