Grassmannians and Gauss maps in piecewise-linear topology (Q1188537)

The following excerpt from the author's introduction to this book gives a good description of its purposes: ``This monograph [is]... an attempt to import into the study of PL manifolds some geometric ideas of... differential topology and differential geometry, ideas from which many important aspects of fiber-bundle theory have developed.... The notion of bundle... goes back to Gauss, whose great work on... surfaces exploits the Gauss map in its original and most literal sense.... In this century... the discovery of the role of Grassmann manifold as the `classifying space' for vector bundles preserved much of the original insight of Gauss' construction.... In the intervening decades, generalizations of the notion of vector bundle have proliferated, and the notion of `universal classifying space' has become a familiar one for many contravariant homotopy functors beyond vector bundles and principal bundles.... However,... the classifying space \(B_ F\) obtained [via E. Brown's Representability Theorem] for a given functor F is truly a `homotopy theoretic' object; it... is a geometric object only in the most shadowy and abstract sense. The same may be said of the map \(X\to B_ F\) classifying an element of F(X). This is no map at all..., but rather a homotopy class of maps.... Note how far this is in spirit from the original Gauss construction, in which a specific geometric object (an embedded manifold) was seen to acquire an equally specific map into a concrete geometric object (the standard sphere), a map whose local properties, moreover, were of intense geometric interest.... The present work is a first attempt at recovering something of this spirit for the study of combinatorial manifolds.... The view taken in these notes is that the local geometry of a triangulated manifold gives rise to a map (... rather than homotopy class of maps) into a universal example which... is constructed from all possible prototypes of local geometries. In view of the tradition and of the naturality of the construction we call this map a Gauss map. This usage is further justified by the fact that... the Gauss map is naturally covered by a bundle map (in the appropriate category) of the tangent bundle of the manifold to some canonical bundle over the universal space (which is thus naturally to be thought of as a kind of `Grassmannian'.)'' Chapter 1 is a - considerably expanded - exposition of the theorem, proved jointly by the author and \textit{C. P. Rourke} [Trans. Am. Math. Soc. 239, 391-397 (1978; Zbl 0382.55010)], that every rational characteristic class of a PL manifold can be represented by an explicit cochain that is defined by the local geometry of the manifold. A generalization to polyhedral homology manifolds is included. In Chapter 2 the author constructs PL Grassmannians \({\mathcal G}_{n,k}\) and canonical PL bundles \(\gamma_{n,k}\) over them and shows that every triangulated and simplexwise linearly immersed PL n-manifold M in \({\mathbb{R}}^{n+k}\) possesses a canonical Gauss map into \({\mathcal G}_{n,k}\) covered by a bundle map from the tangent bundle TM to \(\gamma_{n,k}\). Chapter 3 contains some variations of the construction of \({\mathcal G}_{n,k}\), e.g. a block bundle variant and a variant relating to triangulated homology manifolds. In Chapter 4 the author considers an arbitrary ``geometric'' subcomplex \({\mathcal H}\) of \({\mathcal G}_{n,k}\) (of which we can think as consisting of ``local data'' of a special class of immersions); he proves that, for a manifold \(M^ n\) with no closed components, a map \(M\to {\mathcal H}\) covered by a bundle map \(TM\to \gamma_{n,k}\) warrants the existence of an immersion \(M\to {\mathbb{R}}^{n+k}\) whose Gauss map has its image in \({\mathcal H}\) (which means that the immersion belongs to the specified class). Chapter 5 contains an equivariant version of the theory of Chapter 4, with respect to finite groups which act simplicially on triangulated manifolds and orthogonally on \({\mathbb{R}}^{n+k}\). In Chapter 6, the space \({\mathbb{R}}^{n+k}\) as the target space of immersions is replaced by a triangulated \((n+k)\)-manifold W. The appropriate Grassmannian \({\mathcal G}_{n,k}(W)\) for this situation is constructed as some kind of bundle over W whose fibers are the previous ``affine'' Grassmannians; analogues of the results of Chapters 2-5 are obtained. The last four chapters deal with the piecewise smooth theory. In Chapter 7 the author considers stratified PL n-manifolds M whose strata are equipped with compatible smooth structures. He shows that a stratumwise smooth immersion (satisfying some additional conditions) of such a manifold M into \({\mathbb{R}}^{n+k}\) determines a Gauss map of M into a suitably defined Grassmannian \({\mathcal G}^ c_{n,k}\), covered by a bundle map from TM to a canonical PL n-plane bundle \(\gamma^ c_{n,k}\) over \({\mathcal G}^ c_{n,k}\); pointwise, \({\mathcal G}^ c_{n,k}\) and \(\gamma^ c_{n,k}\) are the same as \({\mathcal G}_{n,k}\) and \(\gamma_{n,k}\), respectively, but have weaker topology. The author proves a theorem analogous to the main theorem of Chapter 4. In Chapter 9 he discusses an equivariant analogue of that theorem; thus Chapter 9 is parallel to Chapter 5. In the same sense, Chapter 10 is parallel to Chapter 6: piecewise smooth immersions into a fixed Riemannian manifold W are considered. In Chapter 8 the author applies the theory of Chapter 7 to the problem of smoothing PL manifolds. The author's requirements on the part of the reader, as far as the prerequisites go, are relatively high. However, he has taken great pains to improve readability: he has paid much attention to motivation, has included many extensive comments, and his formal proofs and formal constructions are usually preceded by thorough informal explanations. Therefore these notes are a very appropriate reading e.g. for advanced graduate students interested in PL topology. The reviewer's only complaint is about a fair share of typographical errors, mostly missing symbols that were supposed to be inserted by hand.