Learning Chromatic Homotopy Theory

This is meant as a quick guide to learning chromatic homotopy theory, completely biased toward my own tastes and opinions. I mark with a star the resources I especially like. If you have any more suggestions, please do send them over at shaybm9@gmail.com.

One thing I wish to emphasize right away: it is very helpful to have a concrete goal. It could be a specific problem to work on or a specific result to understand. To that end, you may wish to find a mentor who can suggest such a goal for you, particularly if you are planning to write your master's thesis or pursue your PhD with them.

Before you start

Before starting to learn chromatic homotopy theory, you should have a decent understanding of spectra, though you don't need too much. Luckily, and perhaps surprisingly given modern trends, you also don't really need to be familiar with higher categories, operads, etc. References for these are somewhat out of the scope of this guide.

A suggested path

Before delving into comprehensive materials, I think it is useful to get a rough overview, and I think the following talk is great for that.

If you enjoy watching videos, you may also want to watch the following mini-course, which covers a good amount of material without going into too many technical details.

In my opinion, the most useful comprehensive reference for learning chromatic homotopy theory is still Lurie's notes on the subject. In a first read, you may wish to skip lectures 3 and 7–10 on the proof of Lazard's and Quillen's theorems, since they are somewhat complicated and can interrupt the flow of a first reading.

Other resources

More introductory material

The following videos are taking a somewhat different point of view on the subject, starting from the telescopic perspective. It is much briefer and looser than anything else on this list, but you may find it very insightful.

Some other introductory lecture notes on chromatic homotopy theory, that you may like better, or may wish to consult along with Lurie's notes.

The following set of notes are insightful, but may be difficult to parse on a first encounter. At some point along your journey, you may wish to browse through them, but I wouldn't recommend them as a first learning resource.

More comprehensive references

Beyond introductory lecture notes, you may wish to consult some other materials, which in my opinion serve more as a useful reference than as a first learning resource.

More topics

The following cover some more specific topics, and may be useful at a later stage.