Pontryagin class

The Pontryagin classes are a sequence of characteristic classes associated with real vector bundles, particularly with the tangent bundle of smooth manifolds. They provide important topological information about the manifold and are particularly used in the context of differential geometry and algebraic topology. ### Definition The Pontryagin classes \( p_i \) are typically defined for a smooth, oriented manifold \( M \) of dimension \( n \), where \( i \) ranges over integers.