Elliptic operators on manifolds with singularities and K-homology

Elliptic operators on smooth compact manifolds are classified by K-homology. We prove that a similar classification is valid also for manifolds with simplest singularities: isolated conical points and edges. The main ingredients of the proof of these results are: Atiyah-Singer difference construction in the noncommutative case and Poincare isomorphism in K- theory for ( our) singular manifolds. As an application we give a formula in topological terms for the obstruction to Fredholm problems on manifolds with edges.