Abstract
This paper is a survey of some recent joint work of Hans Boden, Paul Kirk and the author, as well as work by Cappell, Lee, and Miller, on generalizing the Casson invariant to the group $SU(3)$. The main challenge here is that in this setting there are nontrivial reducible representations. Because of this, the irreducible stratum is not compact, and as a consequence an algebraic count of points does not provide a topological invariant (independent of perturbation).
Information
Digital Object Identifier: 10.7546/giq-3-2002-278-289