Copyright © 2006 Vesta Coufal. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

In classical Lefschetz-Nielsen theory, one defines the Lefschetz invariant L(f) of an endomorphism f of a manifold M. The definition depends on the fundamental group of M, and hence on choosing a base point ∗∈M and a base path from ∗ to f(∗). At times, it is inconvenient or impossible to make these choices. In this paper, we use the fundamental groupoid to define a base-point-free version of the Lefschetz invariant.