<p dir="ltr">In 1956 Hirzebruch found an explicit formula for the denominators of the Todd polynomials, which was proved later in his joint work with Atiyah. We present a new formula for the Todd polynomials in terms of the “forgotten symmetric functions,” which follows from our previous work on complex cobordisms. In particular, this leads to a simpler proof of the Hirzebruch formula and provides new interpretations for the Hirzebruch numbers.</p>
Open Access. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.