Stiefel-Whitney Classes of Representations

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Steven Spallone, Indian Institute of Science Education and Research, Pune

Stiefel-Whitney classes are interesting invariants of representations of finite and compact groups.  The second Stiefel-Whitney class is the obstruction for lifting an orthogonal representation to the spin group.  We discuss the cases of representations of the symmetric group and the orthogonal group.  This is joint work with Jyotirmoy Ganguly and Rohit Joshi.