A Topological Chern-Weil Theory

Download or read book A Topological Chern-Weil Theory written by Anthony Valiant Phillips and published by American Mathematical Soc.. This book was released on 1993 with total page 90 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: We examine the general problem of computing characteristic invariants of principal bundles whose structural group [italic capital]G is a topological group. Under the hypothesis that [italic capital]G has real cohomology finitely generated as an [bold]R-module, we are able to give a completely topological, local method for computing representative cocycles for real characteristic classes; our method applies, for example, to the (homologically) 10-dimensional non-Lie group of Hilton-Roitberg-Stasheff.