10% off all books and free delivery over £50
Buy from our bookstore and 25% of the cover price will be given to a school of your choice to buy more books. *15% of eBooks.

A Topological Chern-Weil Theory

View All Editions (1)

The selected edition of this book is not available to buy right now.
Add To Wishlist
Write A Review

About

A Topological Chern-Weil Theory Synopsis

This work develops a topological analogue of the classical Chern-Weil theory as a method for computing the characteristic classes of principal bundles whose structural group is not necessarily a Lie group, but only a cohomologically finite topological group. Substitutes for the tools of differential geometry, such as the connection and curvature forms, are taken from algebraic topology, using work of Adams, Brown, Eilenberg-Moore, Milgram, Milnor, and Stasheff. The result is a synthesis of the algebraic-topological and differential-geometric approaches to characteristic classes.In contrast to the first approach, specific cocycles are used, so as to highlight the influence of local geometry on global topology. In contrast to the second, calculations are carried out at the small scale rather than the infinitesimal; in fact, this work may be viewed as a systematic extension of the observation that curvature is the infinitesimal form of the defect in parallel translation around a rectangle. This book could be used as a text for an advanced graduate course in algebraic topology.

About This Edition

ISBN: 9780821825662
Publication date:
Author: Anthony V Phillips, David A Stone
Publisher: American Mathematical Society
Format: Paperback
Pagination: 79 pages
Series: Memoirs of the American Mathematical Society
Genres: Topology