A Macaulay2 package for characteristic classes and the topological Euler characteristic of complex projective schemes

The Macaulay2 package CharacteristicClasses provides commands for the computation of the topological Euler characteristic, the degrees of the Chern classes and the degrees of the Segre classes of a closed subscheme of complex projective space. The computations can be done both symbolically and numerically, the latter using an interface to Bertini. We provide some background of the implementation and show how to use the package with the help of examples.