The Hirzebruch formula: 45 years of history and the present state of the art (Q2736033)

In 1953 F. Hirzebruch published his famous signature formula, which expresses the signature of a closed oriented smooth manifold in terms of its Pontryagin classes. For the special case of 4-manifolds this result was proved by V. A. Rokhlin in 1952. The Hirzebruch formula has many applications and a lot of generalizations. In the present paper, which is dedicated to the memory of V. A. Rokhlin, the author reports on several generalizations of the Hirzebruch formula. As an application of a generalized formula he sketches a proof after M. L. Gromov of Novikov's theorem on the topological invariance of the rational Pontryagin classes of smooth manifolds.