Synopsis
The original Russian edition of this book is the fifth in my series "Lectures on Geometry. " Therefore, to make the presentation relatively independent and self-contained in the English translation, I have added supplementary chapters in a special addendum (Chaps. 3Q-36), in which the necessary facts from manifold theory and vector bundle theory are briefly summarized without proofs as a rule. In the original edition, the book is divided not into chapters but into lec tures. This is explained by its origin as classroom lectures that I gave. The principal distinction between chapters and lectures is that the material of each chapter should be complete to a certain extent and the length of chapters can differ, while, in contrast, all lectures should be approximately the same in length and the topic of any lecture can change suddenly in the middle. For the series "Encyclopedia of Mathematical Sciences," the origin of a book has no significance, and the name "chapter" is more usual. Therefore, the name of subdivisions was changed in the translation, although no structural surgery was performed. I have also added a brief bibliography, which was absent in the original edition. The first ten chapters are devoted to the geometry of affine connection spaces. In the first chapter, I present the main properties of geodesics in these spaces. Chapter 2 is devoted to the formalism of covariant derivatives, torsion tensor, and curvature tensor. The major part of Chap.
From the Back Cover
This book treats that part of Riemannian geometry related to more classical topics in a very original, clear and solid style. Before going to Riemannian geometry, the author pre- sents a more general theory of manifolds with a linear con- nection. Having in mind different generalizations of Rieman- nian manifolds, it is clearly stressed which notions and theorems belong to Riemannian geometry and which of them are of a more general nature. Much attention is paid to trans- formation groups of smooth manifolds. Throughout the book, different aspects of symmetric spaces are treated. The author successfully combines the co-ordinate and invariant approaches to differential geometry, which give the reader tools for practical calculations as well as a theoretical understanding of the subject.The book contains a very useful large Appendix on foundations of differentiable manifolds and basic structures on them which makes it self-contained and practically independent from other sources. The results are well presented and useful for students in mathematics and theoretical physics, and for experts in these fields. The book can serve as a textbook for students doing geometry, as well as a reference book for professional mathematicians and physicists.
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