Abstract: Intersection homology was invented by Goresky and MacPherson for the purpose of extending to singular spaces (such as singular algebraic varieties) many of the important homological properties of manifolds and nonsingular varieties, such as Poincare duality and related topological invariants. We'll provide an introduction to this field of research, leading up to present-day work of the author and collaborators.

This talk will be accessible to graduate students.