Fields of 2-planes and two kinds of almost complex structures on compact 4-dimensional manifolds (Q757909)

The starting point of this paper is a result of F. Hirzebruch and H. Hopf who give necessary and sufficient conditions for a smooth, closed, orientable 4-manifold to admit a field of 2-planes. These conditions are in terms of signature, Euler characteristic and self-intersection numbers of characteristic elements. The author uses S. Donaldson's result on the non-existence of nonstandard definite intersection forms to translate the above conditions by elementary considerations into conditions which involve signature and Euler characteristic alone and thus are easy to verify. For example he obtains as a corollary that a 4-manifold M admits 2 linearly independent smooth vector fields iff \(e(M)=0\) and 4 divides \(\sigma\) (M). Finally the author discusses the connection to almost complex structures and gives some examples where he looks at the underlying 4-manifold of a complex surface.