TOPOLOGY OF MANIFOLDS

Credit Hours: 3 · Graduate

A graduate course on the topology of fiber bundles, especially vector bundles and principal bundles, as well as their characteristic classes. It will cover differential forms as well as Stiefel-Whitney, Euler, Chern, and Pontryagin classes. If time allows, other topics may be included. The prerequisites for the class are the material from Math 444/539 and Math 445/540. In particular, the student should be familiar with smooth manifolds, the tangent spaces, homotopy groups, covering spaces, and homology groups.