About forty years have passed since Charles Conley defined the homotopy index. Thereby, he generalized the ideas that go back to the calculus of variations work of Marston Morse. Within this long time the Conley index has proved to be a valuable tool in nonlinear analysis and dynamical systems. A significant development of applied methods has been observed. Later, the index theory has evolved to cover such areas as discrete dynamical...

Following S. Bauer and M. Furuta we investigate finite dimensional approximations of a monopole map in the case b 1 = 0. We define a certain topological degree which is exactly equal to the Seiberg-Witten invariant. Using homotopy invariance of the topological degree a simple proof of the wall crossing formula is derived.

Let M be a closed 1-connected smooth 4-manifolds, and let r be a non-negative integer. We study the problem of finding minimal number of r-periodic points in the smooth homotopy class of a given map f: M-->M. This task is related to determining a topological invariant D^4_r[f], defined in Graff and Jezierski (Forum Math 21(3):491–509, 2009), expressed in terms of Lefschetz numbers of iterations and local fixed point indices of...