Abstract:In this talk I will briefly present the historical development behind Chern's proof in 1944 of the higher dimensional Gauss-Bonnet formula, starting with the work of H. Hopf back in 1925. I will then introduce the notion of double forms (which basically are sums of tensor products of differential forms) and explain how these tensors help us reformulate the Gauss-Bonnet-Chern-Formula a...
Abstract:In the BV formalism the spaces of fields are presented as complexes whose cohomology returns the physical content. Different but equivalent complexes may be used, which turns out to be important conceptually and in practice. One useful operation is that of a partial integration (BV pushforward), which produces a chain map that, under some assumptions, is a quasiisomorphism. This has s...