URegina Topology & Geometry Seminar: Martin Frankland

Characteristic classes are certain cohomology classes that we assign to vector bundles. In this talk, we will first familiarize ourselves with cohomology. We will go over singular cohomology of spaces, the cup product, the cap product, along with examples. Then we will focus on manifolds and discuss de Rham cohomology, the fundamental class, Poincaré duality, and the intersection product.