<p>The literature on natural bundles and natural operators in differential geometry, was until now, scattered in the mathematical journal literature. This book is the first monograph on the subject, collecting this material in a unified presentation. The book begins with an introduction to differential geometry stressing naturality and functionality, and the general theory of connections on arbitrary fibered manifolds. The functional approach to classical natural bundles is extended to a large class of geometrically interesting categories. Several methods of finding all natural operators are given and these are identified for many concrete geometric problems. After reduction each problem to a finite order setting, the remaining discussion is based on properties of jet spaces, and the basic structures from the theory of jets are therefore described here too in a self-contained manner. The relations of these geometric problems to corresponding questions in mathematical physics are brought out in several places in the book, and it closes with a very comprehensive bibliography of over 300 items. This book is a timely addition to literature filling the gap that existed here and will be a standard reference on natural operators for the next few years.</p>

Natural Operations in Differential Geometry

Peter W. Michor

Ivan Kolar

Springer, Verlag

<p>This book treats the fundamentals of differential geometry: manifolds, flows, Lie groups and their actions, invariant theory, differential forms and de Rham cohomology, bundles and connections, Riemann manifolds, isometric actions, and symplectic and Poisson geometry. The layout of the material stresses naturality and functoriality from the beginning and is as coordinate-free as possible. Coordinate formulas are always derived as extra information. Some attractive unusual aspects of this book are as follows: Initial submanifolds and the Frobenius theorem for distributions of nonconstant rank (the Stefan-Sussman theory) are discussed. Lie groups and their actions are treated early on, including the slice theorem and invariant theory. De Rham cohomology includes that of compact Lie groups, leading to the study of (nonabelian) extensions of Lie algebras and Lie groups. The Frolicher-Nijenhuis bracket for tangent bundle valued differential forms is used to express any kind of curvature and second Bianchi identity, even for fiber bundles (without structure groups). Riemann geometry starts with a careful treatment of connections to geodesic structures to sprays to connectors and back to connections, going via the second and third tangent bundles. The Jacobi flow on the second tangent bundle is a new aspect coming from this point of view. Symplectic and Poisson geometry emphasizes group actions, momentum mappings, and reductions. This book gives the careful reader working knowledge in a wide range of topics of modern coordinate-free differential geometry in not too many pages. A prerequisite for using this book is a good knowledge of undergraduate analysis and linear algebra.</p>

Topics in Differential Geometry (Graduate Studies in Mathematics) (Graduate Studies in Mathematics, 93)

Science & Math

Mathematics

American Mathematical Society

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