In the spring of 1985, A. Casson announced an interesting invariant of
homology 3-spheres via constructions on representation spaces. This
invariant generalizes the Rohlin invariant and gives surprising
corollaries in low-dimensional topology. In the fall of that same year,
Selman Akbulut and John McCarthy held a seminar on this invariant. These
notes grew out of that seminar. The authors have tried to remain close
to Casson's original outline and proceed by giving needed details,
including an exposition of Newstead's results. They have often chosen
classical concrete approaches over general methods. For example, they
did not attempt to give gauge theory explanations for the results of
Newstead; instead they followed his original techniques.
Originally published in 1990.
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