Voevodsky’s Nordfjordeid Lectures: Motivic Homotopy Theory Vladimir Voevodsky1, Oliver R¨ondigs2, and Paul Arne Østvær3 1 School of Mathematics, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, USA
[email protected] 2 Fakult¨at f¨ur Mathematik, Universit¨atBielefeld, Bielefeld, Germany
[email protected] 3 Department of Mathematics, University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway
[email protected] 148 V. Voevodsky et al. 1 Introduction Motivic homotopy theory is a new and in vogue blend of algebra and topology. Its primary object is to study algebraic varieties from a homotopy theoretic viewpoint. Many of the basic ideas and techniques in this subject originate in algebraic topology. This text is a report from Voevodsky’s summer school lectures on motivic homotopy in Nordfjordeid. Its first part consists of a leisurely introduction to motivic stable homotopy theory, cohomology theories for algebraic varieties, and some examples of current research problems. As background material, we recommend the lectures of Dundas [Dun] and Levine [Lev] in this volume. An introductory reference to motivic homotopy theory is Voevodsky’s ICM address [Voe98]. The appendix includes more in depth background material required in the main body of the text. Our discussion of model structures for motivic spectra follows Jardine’s paper [Jar00]. In the first part, we introduce the motivic stable homotopy category. The examples of motivic cohomology, algebraic K-theory, and algebraic cobordism illustrate the general theory of motivic spectra. In March 2000, Voevodsky [Voe02b] posted a list of open problems concerning motivic homotopy theory. There has been so much work done in the interim that our update of the status of these conjectures may be useful to practitioners of motivic homotopy theory.