These are the terse notes for a graduate seminar which I conducted at Harvard during the Fall of 1963. By and large my audience was acquainted with the standard material in bundle theory and algebraic topology and I therefore set out directly to develop the theory of characteristic classes in both the standard cohomology theory and K-theory. Since 1963 great strides have been made in the study of K(X), notably by Adams in a series of papers in Topology. Several more modern accounts of the subject are available. In particular the notes of Atiyah, IINotes on K-theoryll not only start more...
These are the terse notes for a graduate seminar which I conducted at Harvard during the Fall of 1963. By and large my audience was acquainted with th...
This paper is a greatly expanded account of the preliminary material that appeared in Atiyah & Bott (1980). Part ofthe reason for the long delay between that paper and this present version was that new view-points emerged that added further interest to the topic and enabled us to provide proofs for what had earlier been conjectures. The length of this paper is due to our desire to present the several different aspects of the problem. We feel that this is justified because the main interest lies not so much in the actual applications as in the methods employed and the interaction between...
This paper is a greatly expanded account of the preliminary material that appeared in Atiyah & Bott (1980). Part ofthe reason for the long delay betwe...
