Serre's theorem and the Nil_l filtration of Lionel Schwartz Author: Jesper Grodal Date: Oct. 1997. Status: To appear in: Proceedings of the BCAT98, Progress in Math., Birkh\"auser Verlag. Pages: 7. Abstract: We give three different cohomological characterizations of classifying spaces of $p$-compact toral groups amongst finite Postnikov systems satisfying mild conditions. This leads to a unifying generalization of previous versions of Serre's theorem on the homotopy groups of a finite complex.