The significantly expanded second edition of this book combines a fascinating account of the life and work of Bernhard Riemann with a lucid discussion of current interaction between topology and physics. The author, a distinguished mathematical physicist, takes into account his own research at the Riemann archives of Göttingen University and developments over the last decade that connect Riemann with numerous significant ideas and methods reflected throughout contemporary mathematics and physics. Special attention is paid in part one to results on the Riemann–Hilbert problem and, in part two, to discoveries in field theory and condensed matter.
Soviet citizens can buy Monastyrsky's biography of Riemann for eleven kopeks. This translated edition will cost considerably more, but it is still good value for the money. And we get Monastyrsky's monograph on topological methods in the bargain. It was a good idea of Birkhiiuser Boston to publish the two translations in one volume. The economics of publishing in a capitalist country make it impossible for us to produce the small cheap paperback booklets, low in quality of paper and high in quality of scholarship, at which the Soviet publishing industry excels. Monastyrsky's two booklets are out standing examples of the genre. By putting them together, Birkhiiuser has enabled them to fit into the Western book-marketing system. The two booklets were written separately and each is complete in itself, but they complement each other beautifully. The Riemann biography is short and terse, like Riemann's own writings. It describes in few words and fewer equations the revolutionary ideas which Riemann brought into mathematics and physics a hundred and twenty years ago. The topological methods booklet describes how some of these same ideas, after lying dormant for a century, found new and fruitful applications in the physics of our own time.
The significantly expanded second edition of this book combines a fascinating account of the life and work of Bernhard Riemann with a lucid discussion of current interaction between topology and physics. The author, a distinguished mathematical physicist, takes into account his own research at the Riemann archives of Göttingen University and developments over the last decade that connect Riemann with numerous significant ideas and methods reflected throughout contemporary mathematics and physics. Special attention is paid in part one to results on the Riemann–Hilbert problem and, in part two, to discoveries in field theory and condensed matter.
This book explores the work of Bernhard Riemann and its impact on mathematics, philosophy and physics. It features contributions from a range of fields, historical expositions, and selected research articles that were motivated by Riemann’s ideas and demonstrate their timelessness. The editors are convinced of the tremendous value of going into Riemann’s work in depth, investigating his original ideas, integrating them into a broader perspective, and establishing ties with modern science and philosophy. Accordingly, the contributors to this volume are mathematicians, physicists, philosophers and historians of science. The book offers a unique resource for students and researchers in the fields of mathematics, physics and philosophy, historians of science, and more generally to a wide range of readers interested in the history of ideas.
'The book is an engaging and influential collection of significant contributions from an assembly of world expert leaders and pioneers from different fields, working at the interface between topology and physics or applications of topology to physical systems … The book explores many interesting and novel topics that lie at the intersection between gravity, quantum fields, condensed matter, physical cosmology and topology … A rich, well-organized, and comprehensive overview of remarkable and insightful connections between physics and topology is here made available to the physics reader.'Contemporary PhysicsSince its birth in Poincaré's seminal 1894 'Analysis Situs', topology has become a cornerstone of mathematics. As with all beautiful mathematical concepts, topology inevitably — resonating with that Wignerian principle of the effectiveness of mathematics in the natural sciences — finds its prominent role in physics. From Chern-Simons theory to topological quantum field theory, from knot invariants to Calabi-Yau compactification in string theory, from spacetime topology in cosmology to the recent Nobel Prize winning work on topological insulators, the interactions between topology and physics have been a triumph over the past few decades.In this eponymous volume, we are honoured to have contributions from an assembly of grand masters of the field, guiding us with their world-renowned expertise on the subject of the interplay between 'Topology' and 'Physics'. Beginning with a preface by Chen Ning Yang on his recollections of the early days, we proceed to a novel view of nuclei from the perspective of complex geometry by Sir Michael Atiyah and Nick Manton, followed by an entrée toward recent developments in two-dimensional gravity and intersection theory on the moduli space of Riemann surfaces by Robbert Dijkgraaf and Edward Witten; a study of Majorana fermions and relations to the Braid group by Louis H Kauffman; a pioneering investigation on arithmetic gauge theory by Minhyong Kim; an anecdote-enriched review of singularity theorems in black-hole physics by Sir Roger Penrose; an adventure beyond anyons by Zhenghan Wang; an aperçu on topological insulators from first-principle calculations by Haijun Zhang and Shou-Cheng Zhang; finishing with synopsis on quantum information theory as one of the four revolutions in physics and the second quantum revolution by Xiao-Gang Wen. We hope that this book will serve to inspire the research community.
This text focuses on developing an intimate acquaintance with the geometric meaning of curvature and thereby introduces and demonstrates all the main technical tools needed for a more advanced course on Riemannian manifolds. It covers proving the four most fundamental theorems relating curvature and topology: the Gauss-Bonnet Theorem, the Cartan-Hadamard Theorem, Bonnet’s Theorem, and a special case of the Cartan-Ambrose-Hicks Theorem.
A concise but self-contained introduction of the central concepts of modern topology and differential geometry on a mathematical level is given specifically with applications in physics in mind. All basic concepts are systematically provided including sketches of the proofs of most statements. Smooth finite-dimensional manifolds, tensor and exterior calculus operating on them, homotopy, (co)homology theory including Morse theory of critical points, as well as the theory of fiber bundles and Riemannian geometry, are treated. Examples from physics comprise topological charges, the topology of periodic boundary conditions for solids, gauge fields, geometric phases in quantum physics and gravitation.
Differential geometry and topology have become essential tools for many theoretical physicists. In particular, they are indispensable in theoretical studies of condensed matter physics, gravity, and particle physics. Geometry, Topology and Physics, Second Edition introduces the ideas and techniques of differential geometry and topology at a level suitable for postgraduate students and researchers in these fields. The second edition of this popular and established text incorporates a number of changes designed to meet the needs of the reader and reflect the development of the subject. The book features a considerably expanded first chapter, reviewing aspects of path integral quantization and gauge theories. Chapter 2 introduces the mathematical concepts of maps, vector spaces, and topology. The following chapters focus on more elaborate concepts in geometry and topology and discuss the application of these concepts to liquid crystals, superfluid helium, general relativity, and bosonic string theory. Later chapters unify geometry and topology, exploring fiber bundles, characteristic classes, and index theorems. New to this second edition is the proof of the index theorem in terms of supersymmetric quantum mechanics. The final two chapters are devoted to the most fascinating applications of geometry and topology in contemporary physics, namely the study of anomalies in gauge field theories and the analysis of Polakov's bosonic string theory from the geometrical point of view. Geometry, Topology and Physics, Second Edition is an ideal introduction to differential geometry and topology for postgraduate students and researchers in theoretical and mathematical physics.
An authoritative but accessible text on one dimensional complex manifolds or Riemann surfaces. Dealing with the main results on Riemann surfaces from a variety of points of view; it pulls together material from global analysis, topology, and algebraic geometry, and covers the essential mathematical methods and tools.
