Robert D. Richtmyer – författare

This book is an introduction to hyperbolic and differential geometry that provides material in the early chapters that can serve as a textbook for a standard upper division course on hyperbolic geometry. For that material, the students need to be familiar with calculus and linear algebra and willing to accept one advanced theorem from analysis without proof. The book goes well beyond the standard course in later chapters, and there is enough material for an honors course, or for supplementary reading. Indeed, parts of the book have been used for both kinds of courses. Even some of what is in the early chapters would surely not be nec­ essary for a standard course. For example, detailed proofs are given of the Jordan Curve Theorem for Polygons and of the decomposability of poly­ gons into triangles, These proofs are included for the sake of completeness, but the results themselves are so believable that most students should skip the proofs on a first reading. The axioms used are modern in character and more "user friendly" than the traditional ones. The familiar real number system is used as an in­ gredient rather than appearing as a result of the axioms. However, it should not be thought that the geometric treatment is in terms of models: this is an axiomatic approach that is just more convenient than the traditional ones.

This book is an introduction to hyperbolic and differential geometry that provides material in the early chapters that can serve as a textbook for a standard upper division course on hyperbolic geometry. For that material, the students need to be familiar with calculus and linear algebra and willing to accept one advanced theorem from analysis without proof. The book goes well beyond the standard course in later chapters, and there is enough material for an honors course, or for supplementary reading. Indeed, parts of the book have been used for both kinds of courses. Even some of what is in the early chapters would surely not be nec­ essary for a standard course. For example, detailed proofs are given of the Jordan Curve Theorem for Polygons and of the decomposability of poly­ gons into triangles, These proofs are included for the sake of completeness, but the results themselves are so believable that most students should skip the proofs on a first reading. The axioms used are modern in character and more "user friendly" than the traditional ones. The familiar real number system is used as an in­ gredient rather than appearing as a result of the axioms. However, it should not be thought that the geometric treatment is in terms of models: this is an axiomatic approach that is just more convenient than the traditional ones.

A first consequence of this difference in texture concerns the attitude we must take toward some (or perhaps most) investigations in "applied mathe­ matics," at least when the mathematics is applied to physics. Namely, those investigations have to be regarded as pure mathematics and evaluated as such. For example, some of my mathematical colleagues have worked in recent years on the Hartree-Fock approximate method for determining the structures of many-electron atoms and ions. When the method was intro­ duced, nearly fifty years ago, physicists did the best they could to justify it, using variational principles, intuition, and other techniques within the texture of physical reasoning. By now the method has long since become part of the established structure of physics. The mathematical theorems that can be proved now (mostly for two- and three-electron systems, hence of limited interest for physics), have to be regarded as mathematics. If they are good mathematics (and I believe they are), that is justification enough. If they are not, there is no basis for saying that the work is being done to help the physicists. In that sense, applied mathematics plays no role in today''s physics. In today''s division of labor, the task of the mathematician is to create mathematics, in whatever area, without being much concerned about how the mathematics is used; that should be decided in the future and by physics.