On topological Radon transformations Original Research Article

We construct a functor, which we call the topological Radon transform, from a category of complex algebraic varieties with morphisms given by divergent diagrams, to constructible functions. The topological Radon transform is thus the composition of a pull-back and a push-forward of constructible functions. We show that the Chern-Schwartz-MacPherson transformation makes the topological Radon transform of constructible functions compatible with a certain homological Verdier-Radon transform. We use this set-up to prove, given a projective variety X, a formula for the Chern-Mather class of the dual variety in terms of that of X.