The interplay between geometry and topology on complex algebraic varieties is a classical theme that goes back to Lefschetz [L] and Zariski [Z] and is always present on the scene; see for instance the work by Libgober [Li]. In this paper we study complements of hypersurfaces, with special attention to the case of hyperplane arrangements as discussed in Orlik-Terao’s book [OT1]. Theorem 1 expresses the degree of the gradient map associated to any homogeneous polynomial h as the number of n-cells that have to be added to a generic hyperplane section D(h) ∩ H to obtain the complement in.
