During the winter term 1987/88 I gave a course at the University of Bonn under the title "Manifolds and Modular Forms." I wanted to develop the theory of "Elliptic Genera" and to learn it myself on this occasion. This theory due to Ochanine, Landweber, Stong and others was relatively new at the time. The word "genus" is meant in the sense of my book "Neue Topologische Methoden in der Algebraischen Geometrie" published in 1956: A genus is a homomorphism of the Thorn cobordism ring of oriented compact manifolds into the complex numbers. Fundamental examples are the signature and the A-genus....
During the winter term 1987/88 I gave a course at the University of Bonn under the title "Manifolds and Modular Forms." I wanted to develop the theory...
