A Topological Chern-Weil Theory

Book excerpt: We examine the general problem of computing characteristic invariants of principal bundles whose structural group [italic capital]G is a topological group. Under the hypothesis that [italic capital]G has real cohomology finitely generated as an [bold]R-module, we are able to give a completely topological, local method for computing representative cocycles for real characteristic classes; our method applies, for example, to the (homologically) 10-dimensional non-Lie group of Hilton-Roitberg-Stasheff.