This book provides a comprehensive introduction to the theory of elliptic genera due to Ochanine, Landweber, Stong, and others. The theory describes a new cobordism invariant for manifolds in terms of modular forms. The book evolved from notes of a course given at the University of Bonn. After providing some background material elliptic genera are constructed, including the classical genera signature and the index of the Dirac operator as special cases. Various properties of elliptic genera are discussed, especially their behaviour in fibre bundles and rigidity for group actions. For stably almost complex manifolds the theory is extended to elliptic genera of higher level. The text is in most parts self-contained. The results are illustrated by explicit examples and by comparison with well-known theorems. The relevant aspects of the theory of modular forms are derived in a seperate appendix, providing also a useful reference for mathematicians working in this field.

Inhalt

1 Background.- 2 Elliptic genera.- 3 A universal addition theorem for genera.- 4 Multiplicativity in fibre bundles.- 5 The Atiyah-Singer index theorem.- 6 Twisted operators and genera.- 7 Riemann-Roch and elliptic genera in the complex case.- 8 A divisibility theorem for elliptic genera.- Appendix I Modular forms.- 1 Fundamental concepts.- 2 Examples of modular forms.- 3 The Weierstraß ?-function as a Jacobi form.- 4 Some special functions and modular forms.- 5 Theta functions, divisors, and elliptic functions.- Appendix II The Dirac operator.- 1 The solution.- 2 The problem.- 1 Zolotarev polynomials.- 2 Interpretation as an algebraic curve.- 3 The differential equation - revisited.- 4 Modular interpretation of Zolotarev polynomials.- 5 The embedding of the modular curve.- 6 Applications to elliptic genera.- Symbols.