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Characteristic Class


Characteristic classes are cohomology classes in the base space of a vector bundle, defined through obstruction theory, which are (perhaps partial) obstructions to the existence of k everywhere linearly independent vector fields on the vector bundle. The most common examples of characteristic classes are the Chern, Pontryagin, and Stiefel-Whitney classes.


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Cite this as:

Weisstein, Eric W. "Characteristic Class." From MathWorld--A Wolfram Web Resource. https://mathworld.wolfram.com/CharacteristicClass.html

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