No label defined (Q4490837)

The first chapter is devoted to a survey of sheaf theory necessary in the rest of the book. In particular, results are recalled concerning acyclic sheaves, taut subspaces, Poincaré-Verdier duality and Borel-Moore homology, illustrated by some examples and exercises. In Chapter 2 Euler classes are studied. The classical Lefschetz fixed point formula is applied to compute the Euler-Poincaré characteristic of a compact oriented topological manifold by means of its Euler class. Thom and Euler classes of oriented real vector bundles are also studied. In particular, Thom isomorphism, Gysin exact sequence, functorial properties of Euler classes and Euler class of a normal bundle are considered. In Chapter 3 Stiefel-Whitney classes are defined in the Grothendieck way by means of projective bundles and Euler classes of associated tautological bundles. Pull-back, direct sum formulas and a formula for the Stiefel-Whitney classes of a tensor product are also established. In the rest of the chapter, characteristic classes of real vector bundles are studied. Real vector bundles of rank \(r\) by means of homotopy classes of maps with values in the infinite Grassmannian \(G_{\infty,r}\) are classified and this establishes a link between the characteristic classes of real vector bundles with coefficients in group a \(M\) and the elements of \(H^.(G_{\infty, r};M)\). By computing this group for \(M=Z_2\) is is showed that the modulo 2 characteristic classes of real vector bundles are polynomials in the Stiefel-Whitney classes. Finally, the usual cohomological classification of real vector bundles is explained. By adapting most of the results concerning Stiefel-Whitney classes to the complex case, Chapter 4 deals with Chern classes. Chern character is also briefly studied. The last part of this chapter is devoted to Iversen's construction of the local Chern character of complexes of complex vector bundles and to its application to the definition of a local Chern character for coherent analytic sheaves. In Chapter 5 first a very simple proof of the Riemann-Roch theorem for the case of compact complex curves is presented. The classical Riemann and Roch theorems are also presented. This chapter ends with the proof of the Hirzebruch-Riemann-Roch theorem for complex projective manifolds.