On the construction and topological invariance of the Pontryagin classes (Q711666)

In the literature, there are various proofs of Novikov's theorem on the topological invariance of the rational Pontryagin classes, originally proved by \textit{S. P. Novikov} [Am. Math. Soc., Transl., II. Ser. 71, 1--42 (1968); translation from Izv. Akad. Nauk SSSR Ser. Mat. 30, 207--246 (1966; Zbl 0199.58202)]. The authors of the paper under review show how sheaves and algebraic \(L\)-theory can be used to construct the rational Pontryagin classes of fiber bundles with Euclidean space as fibre, as well as how to obtain yet another proof of Novikov's theorem. Their proof avoids transversality arguments and torus tricks (playing rôles in earlier proofs). The authors give a perspicuous description of the main steps to achieving their goals by the following words: ``We associate to a topological manifold \(M\) a kind of \` tautological\'\, co-sheaf on \(M\) of symmetric Poincaré chain complexes, in such a way that the cobordism class is a topological invariant by construction. We then produce excision and homotopy invariance theorems for the cobordism groups of such co-sheaves, and use the Hirzebruch signature theorem to extract the rational Pontryagin classes of \(M\) from the cobordism class of the tautological co-sheaf on \(M\).''