Solution

ID: past-exam-of-the-mathematics-course-of-the-university-of-cambridge/2014/iii/paper-12/4/solution

For a closed oriented -dimensional manifold and a commutative coefficient ring , Poincare duality says that cap product with the fundamental class is an isomorphism
Over a field it equivalently gives a nondegenerate Poincare duality pairing between complementary cohomological degrees.
For the six-manifold take rational coefficients and write . Poincare duality gives , so the Euler characteristic is
The middle-degree Poincare duality pairing on is skew-symmetric by graded commutativity of the cup product, since . It is a nondegenerate alternating bilinear form, so its dimension is even. For example, a nonsingular skew-symmetric matrix of odd size would have , impossible over . Therefore .
To realize every even integer, use , and . All three are closed connected orientable six-manifolds. For the connected sum of oriented manifolds, removing a ball from each summand and gluing their boundary spheres gives
in dimension six: each removed open ball decreases the Euler characteristic by one, while the gluing sphere has Euler characteristic zero. If , put
omitting zero copies. The Euler characteristic is . This supplies a closed connected orientable example for every .
Without orientability, evenness need not hold. The Real projective space is a closed six-manifold with one cell in each dimension , so
It is nonorientable because the antipodal deck transformation on has degree and reverses orientation. Thus it gives the required counterexample.

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