Operator calculus of differential chains and differential forms (Q2256840)

Recall that Dirac chains are finitely supported multivector fields. For any open subset \(U\) of Euclidean space, the author defines a topological vector space, the space of differential chains, which contains Dirac chains and polyhedral chains on \(U\), and which admits partitions of unity, and for which boundary is a continuous operator. The usual operators on Euclidean differential forms have continuous analogues for these chains. Roughly speaking, in order to define differential chains, one tries to write a given Dirac chain using small coefficients in front of a, possibly large, number of applications of discrete difference operators, but with the differences themselves being small. Dirac chains expressible in this way are treated as small, in a suitable family of topologies. The space of differential chains is a limit of Dirac chains with these topologies. The author uses differential chains to extend Reynold's transport theorem to nonsmooth domains.