We give a survey of the work of Milnor, Friedlander, Mislin, Suslin and other authors on the Friedlander-Milnor conjecture on the homology of Lie groups made discrete and its relation to the algebraic K-theory of fields.
A bipolynomial is a holomorphic mapping of a sphere onto a sphere such that some point on the target sphere has exactly two preimages. The topological invariants of spaces of bipolynomials without multiple roots are connected with characteristic classes of rational functions with two poles and generalized braid groups associated to extended affine Weyl groups of the serie . We prove that the cohomology rings of the spaces of bipolynomials of bidegree stabilize as tends to infinity and that...