English

Pontryagin numbers and nonnegative curvature

Differential Geometry 2011-09-06 v2 Geometric Topology

Abstract

We prove that any rational linear combination of Pontryagin numbers that is not a multiple of the signature is unbounded on connected closed oriented manifolds of nonnegative sectional curvature. Combining our result with Gromov's finiteness result for the signature yields a new characterization of the L-genus.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.0903.1590,
  title  = {Pontryagin numbers and nonnegative curvature},
  author = {D. Kotschick},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:0903.1590},
  year   = {2011}
}

Comments

7 pages; this version is longer than the published one, since it contains some additional material

R2 v1 2026-06-21T12:19:55.511Z