Jacques LaFontaine - Böcker

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.

The school, the book This book is based on lectures given by the authors of the various chapters in a three week long CIMPA summer school, held in Sophia-Antipolis (near Nice) in July 1992. The first week was devoted to the basics of symplectic and Riemannian geometry (Banyaga, Audin, Lafontaine, Gauduchon), the second was the technical one (Pansu, Muller, Duval, Lalonde and Sikorav). The final week saw the conclusion ofthe school (mainly McDuffand Polterovich, with complementary lectures by Lafontaine, Audin and Sikorav). Globally, the chapters here reflect what happened there. Locally, we have tried to reorganise some ofthe material to make the book more coherent. Hence, for instance, the collective (Audin, Lalonde, Polterovich) chapter on Lagrangian submanifolds and the appendices added to some of the chapters. Duval was not able to write up his lectures, so that genuine complex analysis will not appear in the book, although it is a very current tool in symplectic and contact geometry (and conversely). Hamiltonian systems and variational methods were the subject of some of Sikorav's talks, which he also was not able to write up. On the other hand, F.Labourie, who could not be at the school, wrote a chapter on pseudo-holomorphic curves in Riemannian geometry.

This book is an introduction to differential manifolds. It gives solid preliminaries for more advanced topics: Riemannian manifolds, differential topology, Lie theory. It presupposes little background: the reader is only expected to master basic differential calculus, and a little point-set topology. The book covers the main topics of differential geometry: manifolds, tangent space, vector fields, differential forms, Lie groups, and a few more sophisticated topics such as de Rham cohomology, degree theory and the Gauss-Bonnet theorem for surfaces.Its ambition is to give solid foundations. In particular, the introduction of “abstract” notions such as manifolds or differential forms is motivated via questions and examples from mathematics or theoretical physics. More than 150 exercises, some of them easy and classical, some others more sophisticated, will help the beginner as well as the more expert reader. Solutions are provided for most of them.The book should be of interest to various readers: undergraduate and graduate students for a first contact to differential manifolds, mathematicians from other fields and physicists who wish to acquire some feeling about this beautiful theory.The original French text Introduction aux variétés différentielles has been a best-seller in its category in France for many years.Jacques Lafontaine was successively assistant Professor at Paris Diderot University and Professor at the University of Montpellier, where he is presently emeritus. His main research interests are Riemannian and pseudo-Riemannian geometry, including some aspects of mathematical relativity. Besides his personal research articles, he was involved in several textbooks and research monographs.

This book is an introduction to differential manifolds. It gives solid preliminaries for more advanced topics: Riemannian manifolds, differential topology, Lie theory. It presupposes little background: the reader is only expected to master basic differential calculus, and a little point-set topology. The book covers the main topics of differential geometry: manifolds, tangent space, vector fields, differential forms, Lie groups, and a few more sophisticated topics such as de Rham cohomology, degree theory and the Gauss-Bonnet theorem for surfaces.Its ambition is to give solid foundations. In particular, the introduction of “abstract” notions such as manifolds or differential forms is motivated via questions and examples from mathematics or theoretical physics. More than 150 exercises, some of them easy and classical, some others more sophisticated, will help the beginner as well as the more expert reader. Solutions are provided for most of them.The book should be of interest to various readers: undergraduate and graduate students for a first contact to differential manifolds, mathematicians from other fields and physicists who wish to acquire some feeling about this beautiful theory.The original French text Introduction aux variétés différentielles has been a best-seller in its category in France for many years.Jacques Lafontaine was successively assistant Professor at Paris Diderot University and Professor at the University of Montpellier, where he is presently emeritus. His main research interests are Riemannian and pseudo-Riemannian geometry, including some aspects of mathematical relativity. Besides his personal research articles, he was involved in several textbooks and research monographs.

From the preface:Many years have passed since the first edition. However, the encouragements of various readers and friends have persuaded us to write this third edition. During these years, Riemannian Geometry has undergone many dramatic developments. Here is not the place to relate them. The reader can consult for instance the recent book [Br5]. of our “mentor” Marcel Berger. However, Riemannian Geometry is not only a fascinating field in itself. It has proved to be a precious tool in other parts of mathematics. In this respect, we can quote the major breakthroughs in four-dimensional topology which occurred in the eighties and the nineties of the last century (see for instance [L2]). These have been followed, quite recently, by a possibly successful approach to the Poincaré conjecture. In another direction, Geometric Group Theory, a very active field nowadays (cf. [Gr6]), borrows many ideas from Riemannian or metric geometry. But let us stop hogging the limelight. This is justa textbook. We hope that our point of view of working intrinsically with manifolds as early as possible, and testing every new notion on a series of recurrent examples (see the introduction to the first edition for a detailed description), can be useful both to beginners and to mathematicians from other fields, wanting to acquire some feeling for the subject.