Characteristic exponents of semialgebraic singularities

Let X be a semialgebraic (or algebraic) set and let x₀ ∈ X be a singular point. There are some topological cycles of different dimensions contained in a small neighbourhood of x₀ in X. All these cycles vanish in x₀. The paper is devoted to “vanishing rates” of these cycles, which we call “characteristic exponents”. We prove that the characteristic exponents are invariant under bi‐Lipschitz transformations. (© 2004 WILEY‐VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim)