UC Berkeley

In this thesis we explore connections between the (mod 2 reduction of the) first nonvanishing Milnor invariants of links in the 3-sphere and the spin-bordism groups over certain appropriately defined nilpotent groups. We focus our attention on the generalized Sato-Levine invariants of Conant, Schneiderman, and Teichner, and using their lens of twisted Whitney towers. Though we use very different tools, our results extend results of Igusa and Orr relating Milnor invariants to the homology of nilpotent groups.