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Dmitri Pavlov
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One emerging trend seems to be that the category of sheaves of sets on the site of smooth manifolds (also known as the category of generalized manifolds) is the right category of manifold-like objects. In particular, it includes all sorts of infinite-dimensional manifolds, such as Banach and Fréchet manifolds as full subcategories. It also contains many other categories of manifold-like objects, such as diffeological spaces, as full subcategories. Also, this category can be generalized nicely to higher smooth homotopy types, e.g., smooth stacks = smooth homotopy 1-types, which constantly pop up even if you're studying ordinary differential geometry.

As an example, one can cite the following result: Consider the smooth stack B^∇G of smooth principal G-bundles with connection and the smooth set Ω of differential forms. The set of maps B^∇G→Ω turns out to be canonically isomorphic to the algebra of Ad-invariant polynomials on the Lie algebra of G. Thus one recovers Chern-Weil theory in a very natural way. See the recent paper by Freed and Hopkins for details: http://arxiv.org/abs/1301.5959. I don't think this result can be obtained in any other model of manifold-like objects, because other models do not allow for spaces like B^∇G and Ω.

Dmitri Pavlov
  • 37.8k
  • 4
  • 97
  • 183