This book presents William Clifford’s English translation of Bernhard Riemann’s classic text together with detailed mathematical, historical and philosophical commentary. The basic concepts and ideas, as well as their mathematical background, are provided, putting Riemann’s reasoning into the more general and systematic perspective achieved by later mathematicians and physicists (including Helmholtz, Ricci, Weyl, and Einstein) on the basis of his seminal ideas. Following a historical introduction that positions Riemann’s work in the context of his times, the history of the concept of space in philosophy, physics and mathematics is systematically presented. A subsequent chapter on the reception and influence of the text accompanies the reader from Riemann’s times to contemporary research. Not only mathematicians and historians of the mathematical sciences, but also readers from other disciplines or those with an interest in physics or philosophy will find this work both appealing and insightful.
This classic text serves as a tool for self-study; it is also used as a basic text for undergraduate courses in differential geometry. The author's ability to extract the essential elements of the theory in a lucid and concise fashion allows the student easy access to the material and enables the instructor to add emphasis and cover special topics. The extraordinary wealth of examples within the exercises and the new material, ranging from isoperimetric problems to comments on Einstein's original paper on relativity theory, enhance this new edition.
Differential geometry arguably offers the smoothest transition from the standard university mathematics sequence of the first four semesters in calculus, linear algebra, and differential equations to the higher levels of abstraction and proof encountered at the upper division by mathematics majors. Today it is possible to describe differential geometry as "the study of structures on the tangent space," and this text develops this point of view. This book, unlike other introductory texts in differential geometry, develops the architecture necessary to introduce symplectic and contact geometry alongside its Riemannian cousin. The main goal of this book is to bring the undergraduate student who already has a solid foundation in the standard mathematics curriculum into contact with the beauty of higher mathematics. In particular, the presentation here emphasizes the consequences of a definition and the careful use of examples and constructions in order to explore those consequences.
Unlike many other texts on differential geometry, this textbook also offers interesting applications to geometric mechanics and general relativity. The first part is a concise and self-contained introduction to the basics of manifolds, differential forms, metrics and curvature. The second part studies applications to mechanics and relativity including the proofs of the Hawking and Penrose singularity theorems. It can be independently used for one-semester courses in either of these subjects. The main ideas are illustrated and further developed by numerous examples and over 300 exercises. Detailed solutions are provided for many of these exercises, making An Introduction to Riemannian Geometry ideal for self-study.
Intended for a one year course, this volume serves as a single source, introducing students to the important techniques and theorems, while also containing enough background on advanced topics to appeal to those students wishing to specialise in Riemannian geometry. Instead of variational techniques, the author uses a unique approach, emphasising distance functions and special co-ordinate systems. He also uses standard calculus with some techniques from differential equations to provide a more elementary route. Many chapters contain material typically found in specialised texts, never before published in a single source. This is one of the few works to combine both the geometric parts of Riemannian geometry and the analytic aspects of the theory, while also presenting the most up-to-date research - including sections on convergence and compactness of families of manifolds. Thus, this book will appeal to readers with a knowledge of standard manifold theory, including such topics as tensors and Stokes theorem. Various exercises are scattered throughout the text, helping motivate readers to deepen their understanding of the subject.
Ever since the introduction by Rao in 1945 of the Fisher information metric on a family of probability distributions, there has been interest among statisticians in the application of differential geometry to statistics. This interest has increased rapidly in the last couple of decades with the work of a large number of researchers. Until now an impediment to the spread of these ideas into the wider community of statisticians has been the lack of a suitable text introducing the modern coordinate free approach to differential geometry in a manner accessible to statisticians. Differential Geometry and Statistics aims to fill this gap. The authors bring to this book extensive research experience in differential geometry and its application to statistics. The book commences with the study of the simplest differentiable manifolds - affine spaces and their relevance to exponential families, and goes on to the general theory, the Fisher information metric, the Amari connections and asymptotics. It culminates in the theory of vector bundles, principal bundles and jets and their applications to the theory of strings - a topic presently at the cutting edge of research in statistics and differential geometry.
This book provides an introduction to the basic concepts in differential topology, differential geometry, and differential equations, and some of the main basic theorems in all three areas. This new edition includes new chapters, sections, examples, and exercises. From the reviews: "There are many books on the fundamentals of differential geometry, but this one is quite exceptional; this is not surprising for those who know Serge Lang's books." --EMS NEWSLETTER
This textbook for second-year graduate students is intended as an introduction to differential geometry with principal emphasis on Riemannian geometry. Chapter I explains basic definitions and gives the proofs of the important theorems of Whitney and Sard. Chapter II deals with vector fields and differential forms. Chapter III addresses integration of vector fields and p-plane fields. Chapter IV develops the notion of connection on a Riemannian manifold considered as a means to define parallel transport on the manifold. The author also discusses related notions of torsion and curvature, and gives a working knowledge of the covariant derivative. Chapter V specializes on Riemannian manifolds by deducing global properties from local properties of curvature, the final goal being to determine the manifold completely. Chapter VI explores some problems in PDEs suggested by the geometry of manifolds. The author is well-known for his significant contributions to the field of geometry and PDEs - particularly for his work on the Yamabe problem - and for his expository accounts on the subject. The text contains many problems and solutions, permitting the reader to apply the theorems and to see concrete developments of the abstract theory.
This text presents a graduate-level introduction to differential geometry for mathematics and physics students. The exposition follows the historical development of the concepts of connection and curvature with the goal of explaining the Chern–Weil theory of characteristic classes on a principal bundle. Along the way we encounter some of the high points in the history of differential geometry, for example, Gauss' Theorema Egregium and the Gauss–Bonnet theorem. Exercises throughout the book test the reader’s understanding of the material and sometimes illustrate extensions of the theory. Initially, the prerequisites for the reader include a passing familiarity with manifolds. After the first chapter, it becomes necessary to understand and manipulate differential forms. A knowledge of de Rham cohomology is required for the last third of the text. Prerequisite material is contained in author's text An Introduction to Manifolds, and can be learned in one semester. For the benefit of the reader and to establish common notations, Appendix A recalls the basics of manifold theory. Additionally, in an attempt to make the exposition more self-contained, sections on algebraic constructions such as the tensor product and the exterior power are included. Differential geometry, as its name implies, is the study of geometry using differential calculus. It dates back to Newton and Leibniz in the seventeenth century, but it was not until the nineteenth century, with the work of Gauss on surfaces and Riemann on the curvature tensor, that differential geometry flourished and its modern foundation was laid. Over the past one hundred years, differential geometry has proven indispensable to an understanding of the physical world, in Einstein's general theory of relativity, in the theory of gravitation, in gauge theory, and now in string theory. Differential geometry is also useful in topology, several complex variables, algebraic geometry, complex manifolds, and dynamical systems, among other fields. The field has even found applications to group theory as in Gromov's work and to probability theory as in Diaconis's work. It is not too far-fetched to argue that differential geometry should be in every mathematician's arsenal.
This book is an introduction to Cartan's approach to differential geometry. Two central methods in Cartan's geometry are the theory of exterior differential systems and the method of moving frames. This book presents thorough and modern treatments of both subjects, including their applications to both classic and contemporary problems. It begins with the classical geometry of surfaces and basic Riemannian geometry in the language of moving frames, along with an elementary introduction to exterior differential systems. Key concepts are developed incrementally with motivating examples leading to definitions, theorems, and proofs. Once the basics of the methods are established, the authors develop applications and advanced topics.One notable application is to complex algebraic geometry, where they expand and update important results from projective differential geometry. The book features an introduction to $G$-structures and a treatment of the theory of connections. The Cartan machinery is also applied to obtain explicit solutions of PDEs via Darboux's method, the method of characteristics, and Cartan's method of equivalence. This text is suitable for a one-year graduate course in differential geometry, and parts of it can be used for a one-semester course. It has numerous exercises and examples throughout. It will also be useful to experts in areas such as PDEs and algebraic geometry who want to learn how moving frames and exterior differential systems apply to their fields.
