No label defined (Q4549293)

In 1963 Atiyah and Singer announced their celebrated index theorem of elliptic operators. Since then many mathematicians studied intensively the elliptic operators on closed manifolds. The standard examples are the de Rham operator, the Dolbeaut operator, the Hodge operator and Dirac operator. Their applications in low dimensional manifolds are the Donaldson invariants, the Seiberg-Witten invariants and the Gromov-Witten invariants. Elliptic operators on closed manifolds are Fredholm. So the nonlinear elliptic operators have locally finite dimensional kernel and cokernel. Moreover, elliptic operators split into an isomorphism between infinite dimensional spaces and a linear map between finite dimensional spaces. Nonlinear elliptic operators have locally finite dimensional approximations and Kuranishi structures and yield formal dimensions of various moduli spaces. After the appropriate compactifications of moduli spaces, for example the Uhlenbeck-compactification, Gromov-compactification, and Kontsevich-compactification, we can define the invariants corresponding to the elliptic operators. This article is a brief survey on finite dimensional approximations of elliptic operators, such as the above-mentioned ones, Conley-Zehnder index, Casson invariant, and Seiberg-Witten-Floer homotopy type. The author introduces finite dimensional approximations and their invariants defined by some nonlinear elliptic operators. He regards some kind of homotopy class of the operator itself as an invariant. Especially he introduces the Seiberg-Witten map on a closed spin 4-manifold which is a Pin(2)-equivariant map. The finite dimensional approximation also has a Pin(2)-equivariant structure. Using this structure in his earlier work he got a partial result of the 11/8-conjecture, \(b_2^+\geq \frac{3}{16}|\text{sign}(X)|\). For the entire collection see [Zbl 0993.00022].