Book Review: Characteristic classes

Characteristic Classes

These are lecture notes for a series of five lectures I gave to other graduate students about characteristic classes through UT Austin’s summer minicourse program (see https://www.ma.utexas.edu/users/ richard.wong/Minicourses.html for more details). Beware of potential typos. In these notes I cover the basic theory of Stiefel-Whitney, Wu, Chern, Pontrjagin, and Euler classes, introducing some i...

Book Review

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Cohomology and Characteristic Classes

We prove Poincar e Duality for L p cohomology, 1 p 1 We study the pairings between L p and L 1 and construct characteristic classes.

Exercises on characteristic classes

1. a) Compute the Stiefel-Whitney classes of the tangent bundle of RP . (Use the method from class for the tangent Chern classes of complex projectives spaces.) b) Conclude that if the tangent bundle is trivial, then n = 2 − 1 for some m. (In fact n must be 0, 1, 3, 7, but this is much harder to prove; one proof uses the Bott periodicity theorem.) c) Deduce (very easily!) a complete characteriz...

Book Review