森田 茂之

講演題目

特性類を巡って

Around characteristic classes

英文サマリ

Characteristic classes are ways of expressing degree of curvature of various geometric structures in terms of cohomology. Typical classical examples include the Euler class and the Pontryagin classes. From the early 1970's onward, there arose new theories of characteristic classes such as that of foliations and also that of differentiable fiber bundles with a given closed manifold as fibers.

Now I feel as if I have been making a long journey around various characteristic classes over 50 years. I met many people and I studied many things from them. Here I would like to talk about some of these experiences.