Ravenel received his PhD from Brandeis University in 1972 under the direction of Edgar H. Brown, Jr. with a thesis on exotic characteristic classes of spherical fibrations.

-term to the cohomology of the Morava stabilizer group, which exhibits certain periodic phenomena in the Adams–Novikov spectral sequence and can be seen as the beginning of chromatic homotopy theory.

Applying this, the authors compute the second line of the Adams–Novikov spectral sequence and establish the non-triviality of a certain family in the stable homotopy groups of spheres.

All but one of the Ravenel conjectures were proved by Ethan Devinatz, Michael J. Hopkins and Jeff Smith[4] not long after the article got published.

[5] In June 2023, Robert Burklund, Jeremy Hahn, Ishan Levy, and Tomer Schlank announced a disproof of the last remaining conjecture.

[6] In further work, Ravenel calculates the Morava K-theories of several spaces and proves important theorems in chromatic homotopy theory together with Hopkins.