Chow motives and cycle modules

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Chow motives have been introduced by Alexander Grothendieck (1928-2014), winner of the fields Medal (analog of Noble Price) in 1966. These objects and their generalizations as for instance Vladimir Voevodsky's triangulated categories of motives play a significant role in algebra and algebraic geometry. Starting with Vladimir Voevodsky's proof of the Milnor conjecture which uses Markus Rost's computation of the Chow motive of a norm quadric, motives and the closely related algebraic cycles invaded first the theory of quadratic forms and later the theory of algebraic groups. The so called Rost nilpotence principle which has been verified for projective homogeneous varieties as for instance quadrics plays here an important role, as one of the main tools to decompose motives. It is conjectured that this principle is true for all smooth projective varieties, and has been proven by myself for surfaces and certain threefolds over fields of characteristic 0. In these proofs the cycle modules of Markus Rost, which in particular have been introduced as a tool to compute Chow groups, are indispensable.