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Consider a smooth, closed, compact finite-dim manifold. We have Poincare Duality to relate the cocycles and cycles.

I would like to know where I can find a reference for a proof that the cup product of the Cohomology Ring is given by the intersection of the corresponding cycles.

Griffiths and Harris talk about intersection number, and discuss this result in chapter 0, Hatcher's book doesn't mention this explicitly as far as I can tell, Katz' little book on enumerative geometry alludes to this, Fulton's book on Young Tableaux dodges this, etc.

I am preparing to give a talk on Schubert Cells and Schubert calculus, and I realized that I have not checked the details of this proof.

Thanks in advance!

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  • $\begingroup$ The tag Schubert-varieties is not quite right, but the tag schubert-cells does not exist. $\endgroup$
    – B. Bischof
    Commented Apr 4, 2010 at 22:27
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    $\begingroup$ It's a chapter in Bredon's "Geometry and topology". You can also prove it readily from what's in Hatcher, but I don't think it's assembled that way. You need the Thom isomorphism and its relation to Poincare duality to get anywhere. $\endgroup$ Commented Apr 4, 2010 at 22:31
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    $\begingroup$ Michael Hutchings has some lecture notes on this for cohomology classes of smooth closed submanifolds; key point is to use Thom class. One can also ask for analogue in etale cohomology without smoothness or properness hypotheses, for which one has to modify the technique to make a rigorous proof in such generality. $\endgroup$
    – BCnrd
    Commented Apr 4, 2010 at 22:52
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    $\begingroup$ Here are the notes that Brian Conrad refers to: math.berkeley.edu/~hutching/teach/215b-2005/cup.pdf $\endgroup$ Commented Apr 4, 2010 at 23:05
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    $\begingroup$ For de Rham cohomology, I think you can find this in Bott-Tu. (Indeed it's almost immediate from the explicit tubular-neighborhood construction of forms $\omega_M$ representing $\text{PD}(M)$: if $M$ and $N$ are transverse, then $\omega_M\wedge \omega_N$ is equal to $\omega_{M\cap N}$ if you choose your coordinates consistently.) $\endgroup$
    – Tom Church
    Commented Apr 5, 2010 at 0:04

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Bott and Tu do this completely, in the de Rham theoretic setting of course.

Here's an alternate proof I have used when I teach this material, which I find slightly more clean and direct than using Thom classes in de Rham theory (which require choice of tubular neighborhood theorem, etc) and works over the integers.

Definition: Given a collection $S = \{W_i\}$ of submanifolds of a manifold $X$, define the smooth chain complex transverse to $S$, denoted ${C^S}_*(X)$, by using the subgroups of the singular chain groups in which the basis chains $\Delta^n \to X$ are smooth and transverse to all of the $W_i$.

Lemma: The inclusion ${C^S}_*(X) \to C_*(X)$ is a quasi-isomorophism, for any such collection $S$.

Now if $W \in S$ then "count of intersection with $W$" gives a perfectly well-defined element $\tau_W$ of ${\rm Hom}(C^S_*(X), A)$ and thus by this quasi-isomorphism a well-defined cocycle if the $W$ is proper and has no boundary. It is immediate that this cocycle evaluates on cycles which are represented by closed submanifolds through intersection count.

There are two approaches to show that cup product agrees with intersection on cohomology. Briefly, one is to take $W, V$ over $M$ and consider the special case of $W \times M$ and $M \times V$ over $M \times M$. There some work with the K"unneth theorem leads to direct analysis in this case. But this case is "universal" - cup products in $M$ are pulled back from ``external'' cup products over $M \times M$. A second proof given in https://arxiv.org/abs/2106.05986 uses a variant of the theory, where one fixes a triangulation or cubulation, and assumes $W, V$ transverse to those. There we explicitly see that these products do not agree at the cochain level (they can't since intersection is commutative, but non-commutativity of cup product is reflected in Steenrod operations), but Friedman, Medina and I show a vector field flow leads to a cobounding of the difference.

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