Lazard's universal ring

In mathematics, Lazard's universal ring is a ring introduced by Michel Lazard in Lazard (1955) over which the universal commutative one-dimensional formal group law is defined.

There is a universal commutative one-dimensional formal group law over a universal commutative ring defined as follows. We let

F(x, y)

be

x + y + Σc_i,j xⁱy^j

for indeterminates

c_i,j,

and we define the universal ring R to be the commutative ring generated by the elements c_i,j, with the relations that are forced by the associativity and commutativity laws for formal group laws. More or less by definition, the ring R has the following universal property:

For every commutative ring S, one-dimensional formal group laws over S correspond to ring homomorphisms from R to S.

The commutative ring R constructed above is known as Lazard's universal ring. At first sight it seems to be incredibly complicated: the relations between its generators are very messy. However Lazard proved that it has a very simple structure: it is just a polynomial ring (over the integers) on generators of degree 1, 2, 3, ... (where c_i,j has degree (i + j − 1)). Quillen (1969) proved that the coefficient ring of complex cobordism is naturally isomorphic as a graded ring to Lazard's universal ring. Hence, topologists commonly regrade the Lazard ring so that c _{i, j} has degree 2(i+j-1), because the coefficient ring of complex cobordism is evenly graded.