Georgia Institute of Technology College of Sciences

Alesker has introduced the notion of a smooth valuation on a smooth manifold M. This is a special kind of set function, defined on sufficiently regular compact subsets A of M, extending the corresponding idea from classical convexity theory. Formally, a smooth valuation is a kind of curvature integral; informally, it is a sum of Euler characteristics of intersections of A with a collection of objects B. Smooth valuations admit a natural multiplication, again due to Alesker. I will aim to explain the rather abstruse formal definition of this multiplication, and its relation to the ridiculously simple informal counterpart given by intersections of the objects B.