Philip Hackney

The following two items are difficult for me to wash properly.

Characteristic Classes

This summer a group is reading Characteristic Classes by Milnor and Stasheff. We are meeting on Fridays at 1 for an hour or two in math 731.

• June 13 - Christine. Vector Bundles and constructions on them. (Ch. 2 & 3)
• June 20 - Me. Stiefel-Whitney classes. (Ch. 4)
• June 27 - Steven. Grassmann Manifolds. (Ch. 5 & 6)
• Thursday, July 3 - Botong. Mod 2 Cohomology of Grassmannians and existence of SW classes. (Ch. 7 & 8)
• July 11 - Me. Oriented bundles, Euler class, and Thom isomorphism. (Ch. 9 & 10)
• July 18 - Christine. Computations in a smooth manifold. (Ch. 11)
• July 25 - Me. Obstruction Theory & Complex Bundles. (Ch. 12 & 13)
• Wednesday, July 30 (11am-1pm) - Botong. Chern Classes (Ch. 14)
• Monday, August 11 - Christine. Pontrjagin Classes. Chern & Pontrjagin Numbers. (Ch. 15 & 16)
• August 15 - Me. Oriented Cobordism & Thom Spaces. (Ch. 17 & 18)

Publications

doi:10.1016/j.topol.2004.11.007 k-alternating knots. With Nathan Walters and Leonard Van Wyk.
doi:10.1137/050629793 On the Minimum Rank Among Positive Semidefinite Matrices with a Given Graph. With Sivaram Narayan and many others.

Other Websites

The Independent Monkey is the infrequently updated blog of my former officemate / housemate Navin.
Javid Validashti used to be my officemate.
Jim Clarkson used to be Javid's officemate.