F. Tricerri - Böcker

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.

The aim of this volume is to offer a set of high quality contributions on recent advances in Differential Geometry and Topology, with some emphasis on their application in physics.A broad range of themes is covered, including convex sets, Kaehler manifolds and moment map, combinatorial Morse theory and 3-manifolds, knot theory and statistical mechanics.