The Universal Euler Characteristic of V-Manifolds

Abstract

The Euler characteristic is the only additive topological invariant for spaces of certain sort, in particular, for manifolds with certain finiteness properties. A generalization of the notion of a manifold is the notion of a V-manifold. We discuss a universal additive topological invariant of V-manifolds, the universal Euler characteristic. It takes values in the ring freely generated (as a Z-module) by isomorphism classes of finite groups. We also consider the universal Euler characteristic on the class of locally closed equivariant unions of cells in equivariant CW-complexes. We show that it is a universal additive invariant satisfying a certain “induction relation.” We give Macdonald-type identities for the universal Euler characteristic for V-manifolds and for cell complexes of the described type.