On Chern's conjecture about the Euler characteristic of affine manifolds
The development the theory of characteristic classes allowed Shiing-Shen Chern to generalize the Gauss Bonnet theorem to Riemannian manifolds of arbitrary dimension. The Chern Gauss Bonnet theorem expresses the Euler characteristic as an integral of a polynomial evaluated on the curvature tensor, i....
- Autores:
-
Martínez Madrid, Daniela
- Tipo de recurso:
- Fecha de publicación:
- 2018
- Institución:
- Universidad Nacional de Colombia
- Repositorio:
- Universidad Nacional de Colombia
- Idioma:
- spa
- OAI Identifier:
- oai:repositorio.unal.edu.co:unal/63965
- Acceso en línea:
- https://repositorio.unal.edu.co/handle/unal/63965
http://bdigital.unal.edu.co/64628/
- Palabra clave:
- 51 Matemáticas / Mathematics
Teorema de Chern-Gauss-Bonnet
Chern-Gauss-Bonnet theorem
Vectores
Vectors
- Rights
- openAccess
- License
- Atribución-NoComercial 4.0 Internacional
Summary: | The development the theory of characteristic classes allowed Shiing-Shen Chern to generalize the Gauss Bonnet theorem to Riemannian manifolds of arbitrary dimension. The Chern Gauss Bonnet theorem expresses the Euler characteristic as an integral of a polynomial evaluated on the curvature tensor, i.e if K is the curvature form of the Levi-Civita connection, the Chern Gauss Bonnet formula is . In particular, the theorem implies that if the Levi Civita connection is _at, the Euler characteristic is zero.An a_ne structure on a manifold is an atlas whose transition functions are a_ne transformations. The existence of such a structure is equivalent to the existence of a _at torsion free connection on the tangent bundle. Around 1955 Chern conjectured the following: Conjecture. The Euler characteristic of a closed affine manifold is zero. Not all fat torsion free connections on TM admit a compatible metric, and therefore, Chern-Weil theory cannot be used in general to write down the Euler class in terms of the curvature. In 1955, Benzécri [1] proved that a closed affine surface has zero Euler characteristic. Later, in 1958, Milnor [11] proved inequalities which completely characterise those oriented rank two bundles over a surface that admit a fiat connection. These inequalities prove that in case of a surface the condition "be torsion free" in Chern's conjecture is not necessary. In 1975, Kostant and Sullivan [9] proved Chern's conjecture in the case where the manifold is complete. In 1977, Smillie [15] proved that the condition that the connection is torsion free matters. For each even dimension greater than 2, Smillie constructed closed manifolds with non-zero Euler characteristic that admit a _at connection on their tangent bundle. In 2015, Klingler [14] proved the conjecture for special affine manifolds. That is, affine manifolds that admit a parallel volume form. |
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