Riemannian Topology and Structures on Manifolds results from a similarly entitled conference held on the occasion of Charles P. Boyer’s 65th birthday. The various contributions to this volume discuss recent advances in the areas of positive sectional curvature, Kähler and Sasakian geometry, and their interrelation to mathematical physics, especially M and superstring theory. Focusing on these fundamental ideas, this collection presents review articles, original results, and open problems of interest.
This book represents a novel approach to differential topology. Its main focus is to give a comprehensive introduction to the classification of manifolds, with special attention paid to the case of surfaces, for which the book provides a complete classification from many points of view: topological, smooth, constant curvature, complex, and conformal. Each chapter briefly revisits basic results usually known to graduate students from an alternative perspective, focusing on surfaces. We provide full proofs of some remarkable results that sometimes are missed in basic courses (e.g., the construction of triangulations on surfaces, the classification of surfaces, the Gauss-Bonnet theorem, the degree-genus formula for complex plane curves, the existence of constant curvature metrics on conformal surfaces), and we give hints to questions about higher dimensional manifolds. Many examples and remarks are scattered through the book. Each chapter ends with an exhaustive collection of problems and a list of topics for further study. The book is primarily addressed to graduate students who did take standard introductory courses on algebraic topology, differential and Riemannian geometry, or algebraic geometry, but have not seen their deep interconnections, which permeate a modern approach to geometry and topology of manifolds.
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 book is an English translation of the famous "Green Book" by Lafontaine and Pansu (1979). It has been enriched and expanded with new material to reflect recent progress. Additionally, four appendices, by Gromov on Levy's inequality, by Pansu on "quasiconvex" domains, by Katz on systoles of Riemannian manifolds, and by Semmes overviewing analysis on metric spaces with measures, as well as an extensive bibliography and index round out this unique and beautiful book.
This volume contains the papers presented at a special symposium organized to report on the increasing recent activities in differential geometry. The papers have been carefully reviewed by a panel of experts and pertain to the following areas of research: Dynamical Systems, Geometry of Submanifolds and Tensor Geometry, Lie Sphere Geometry, Riemannian Geometry, Yang-Mills Connections, and Geometry of the Laplace Operator.
The goal of this book is to introduce the reader to some of the most frequently used techniques in modern global geometry. Suited to the beginning graduate student willing to specialize in this very challenging field, the necessary prerequisite is a good knowledge of several variables calculus, linear algebra and point-set topology.The book's guiding philosophy is, in the words of Newton, that ?in learning the sciences examples are of more use than precepts?. We support all the new concepts by examples and, whenever possible, we tried to present several facets of the same issue.While we present most of the local aspects of classical differential geometry, the book has a ?global and analytical bias?. We develop many algebraic-topological techniques in the special context of smooth manifolds such as Poincar duality, Thom isomorphism, intersection theory, characteristic classes and the Gauss-;Bonnet theorem.We devoted quite a substantial part of the book to describing the analytic techniques which have played an increasingly important role during the past decades. Thus, the last part of the book discusses elliptic equations, including elliptic Lpand Hlder estimates, Fredholm theory, spectral theory, Hodge theory, and applications of these. The last chapter is an in-depth investigation of a very special, but fundamental class of elliptic operators, namely, the Dirac type operators.The second edition has many new examples and exercises, and an entirely new chapter on classical integral geometry where we describe some mathematical gems which, undeservedly, seem to have disappeared from the contemporary mathematical limelight.
This book contains a clear exposition of two contemporary topics in modern differential geometry: distance geometric analysis on manifolds, in particular, comparison theory for distance functions in spaces which have well defined bounds on their curvature the application of the Lichnerowicz formula for Dirac operators to the study of Gromov's invariants to measure the K-theoretic size of a Riemannian manifold. It is intended for both graduate students and researchers.
The Geometrisation Conjecture was proposed by William Thurston in the mid 1970s in order to classify compact 3-manifolds by means of a canonical decomposition along essential, embedded surfaces into pieces that possess geometric structures. It contains the famous Poincaré Conjecture as a special case. In 2002, Grigory Perelman announced a proof of the Geometrisation Conjecture based on Richard Hamilton’s Ricci flow approach, and presented it in a series of three celebrated arXiv preprints. Since then there has been an ongoing effort to understand Perelman’s work by giving more detailed and accessible presentations of his ideas or alternative arguments for various parts of the proof. This book is a contribution to this endeavour. Its two main innovations are first a simplified version of Perelman’s Ricci flow with surgery, which is called Ricci flow with bubbling-off, and secondly a completely different and original approach to the last step of the proof. In addition, special effort has been made to simplify and streamline the overall structure of the argument, and make the various parts independent of one another. A complete proof of the Geometrisation Conjecture is given, modulo pre-Perelman results on Ricci flow, Perelman’s results on the ℒ-functional and κ-solutions, as well as the Colding–Minicozzi extinction paper. The book can be read by anyone already familiar with these results, or willing to accept them as black boxes. The structure of the proof is presented in a lengthy introduction, which does not require knowledge of geometric analysis. The bulk of the proof is the existence theorem for Ricci flow with bubbling-off, which is treated in parts I and II. Part III deals with the long time behaviour of Ricci flow with bubbling-off. Part IV finishes the proof of the Geometrisation Conjecture.
The central theme of this book is the theorem of Ambrose and Singer, which gives for a connected, complete and simply connected Riemannian manifold a necessary and sufficient condition for it to be homogeneous. This is a local condition which has to be satisfied at all points, and in this way it is a generalization of E. Cartan's method for symmetric spaces. The main aim of the authors is to use this theorem and representation theory to give a classification of homogeneous Riemannian structures on a manifold. There are eight classes, and some of these are discussed in detail. Using the constructive proof of Ambrose and Singer many examples are discussed with special attention to the natural correspondence between the homogeneous structure and the groups acting transitively and effectively as isometrics on the manifold.
Differential geometry began as the study of curves and surfaces using the methods of calculus. In time, the notions of curve and surface were generalized along with associated notions such as length, volume, and curvature. At the same time the topic has become closely allied with developments in topology. The basic object is a smooth manifold, to which some extra structure has been attached, such as a Riemannian metric, a symplectic form, a distinguished group of symmetries, or a connection on the tangent bundle. This book is a graduate-level introduction to the tools and structures of modern differential geometry. Included are the topics usually found in a course on differentiable manifolds, such as vector bundles, tensors, differential forms, de Rham cohomology, the Frobenius theorem and basic Lie group theory. The book also contains material on the general theory of connections on vector bundles and an in-depth chapter on semi-Riemannian geometry that covers basic material about Riemannian manifolds and Lorentz manifolds. An unusual feature of the book is the inclusion of an early chapter on the differential geometry of hypersurfaces in Euclidean space. There is also a section that derives the exterior calculus version of Maxwell's equations. The first chapters of the book are suitable for a one-semester course on manifolds. There is more than enough material for a year-long course on manifolds and geometry.
