Characteristic classes and singular varieties
Characteristic classes of manifolds are usually cohomology classes associated to the tangent bundle of the manifold. Hirzebruch's theory unifies three important theories of characteristic classes of smooth manifolds: Chern classes, Todd classes and Thom-Hirzebruch L-classes. These three classes, Chern, Todd and L-classes, were individually extended to singular varieties. In 2010, Brasselet, Schürmann and Yokura extended Hirzebruch classes to singular varieties using natural transformations, and unified in a functorial sense three theories of characteristic classes of singular varieties: the Chern transformation of MacPherson-Schwartz, the Todd transformation of Baum-Fulton-MacPherson and the L-transformation of Cappell-Shaneson. In this talk, we will discuss Hirzebruch classes and delve into the relationships between these transformations.