EVENT DETAILS AND ABSTRACT

Title: Characteristic classes for bundles of G-manifolds via higher Reidemeister torsion
Speaker: Tom Goodwillie
Speaker Info: Brown University
Brief Description:
Special Note:
Abstract:

(joint with Kiyoshi Igusa) Igusa defined cohomology classes ("higher Reidemeister torsion") in the base of a bundle of smooth compact manifolds and showed that these can detect many nontrivial bundles of h-cobordisms, as well as many sphere bundles that do not arise from vector bundles. We extend much of this work to bundles whose fibers have a smooth action of a finite group.