The mathematical work of V. K. Patodi (Q2341080)

In this excellent paper, the author gives a brief survey on aspects of the local index theory as developed from the mathematical works of V. K. Patodi. It is dedicated to the 70th anniversary of Patodi. Patodi made quite a number of fundamental contributions to mathematics. These contributions have had deep and wide spread influences in geometry, topology, number theory, as well as in mathematical physics. Patodi's work centers around the Atiyah-Singer index theory, a major subject in global analysis. The first success of proving the Atiyah-Singer index theorem directly by heat kernel method was achieved by Patodi , who carried out the ``fantastic cancellation'' for the Laplace operators and who for the first time proved a local version of the Gauss-Bonnet-Chern theorem. Atiyah-Patodi-Singer established their famous Atiyah-Patodi-Singer theory for manifolds with boundary and they introduced a very important spectral invariant: the eta invariant.