Is there a notion of a chain complex with corners?

2012-10-21T11:56:58Z

Roughly speaking, algebraic topology works by reducing questions about topological objects such as manifolds and cell to questions about chain complexes.

On the topological side, although in the PL category a manifold can have a boundary and not much more, in the smooth category there is a notion of a manifold with corners, that is that every point has a neighbourhood diffeomorphic to $\mathbb{R}_{\geq 0}^n$. To go further, there is a notion of a manifold with faces, which adds an additional piece of stratified structure whose existence guarantees that each piece of the boundary has a smooth collar in the manifold (See Appendix A of Farber's Topology of Closed One-Forms).

On the algebraic side, there is a notion of the boundary of symmetric chain complex (I think due to Ranicki), which measures the chain-level failure of Poincare-Lefshetz duality.

Question: Is there a notion of a chain complex with corners or with faces that has been studied in the literature?

It's not hard to imagine how this would work, by mapping a symmetric chain complex with boundary to a boundary of a symmetric chain complex, for example; but I'm asking whether there is any literature on such structures.

Answer by Andrew Ranicki for Is there a notion of a chain complex with corners?

2013-05-08T05:47:22Z

The chain complex n-ads in my 1992 CUP book Algebraic L-theory and topological manifolds are chain complexes with corners. They are the chain complex analogues of Wall's n-ads (which hark back to J.H.C. Whitehead).

Is there a notion of a chain complex with corners? - MathOverflow

Is there a notion of a chain complex with corners?

Answer by Andrew Ranicki for Is there a notion of a chain complex with corners?