Theory of valuations on manifolds, I. Linear spaces

Abstract

This is the first part of a series of articles where we are going to develop theory of valuations on manifolds generalizing the classical theory of continuous valuations on convex subsets of a linear space. In this article we still work only with linear spaces. We introduce a space of smooth (non-translation invariant) valuations on a finite dimensional linear space. We present three descriptions of this space. We describe the canonical multiplicative structure on it generalizing the results for polynomial valuations obtained by the author in Geom. Funct. Anal. 14 (2004).