Solutions Elementary Differential Geometry

This volume is based on the lectures given at the First Inter University Graduate School on Gravitation and Cosmology organized by IUCAA, Pune, in 1989. This series of Schools have been carefully planned to provide a sound background and preparation for students embarking on research in these and related topics. Consequently, the contents of these lectures have been meticulously selected and arranged. The topics in the present volume offer a firm mathematical foundation for a number of subjects to be de­ veloped later. These include Geometrical Methods for Physics, Quantum Field Theory Methods and Relativistic Cosmology.

This concise text on geometry with computer modeling presents some elementary methods for analytical modeling and visualization of curves and surfaces. The author systematically examines such powerful tools as 2-D and 3-D animation of geometric images, transformations, shadows, and colors, and then further studies more complex problems in differential geometry. Well-illustrated with more than 350 figures–-reproducible using Maple programs in the book–-the work is devoted to three main areas: curves, surfaces, and polyhedra.

This book is based upon my monograph Index Theory for Hamiltonian Systems with Applications published in 1993 in Chinese, and my notes for lectures and courses given at Nankai University, Brigham Young University, ICTP-Trieste, and the Institute of Mathematics of Academia Sinica during the last ten years. The aim of this book is twofold: (1) to give an introduction to the index theory for symplectic matrix paths and its iteration theory, which form a basis for the Morse theoretical study on Hamilto­ nian systems, and to give applications of this theory to periodic boundary value problems of nonlinear Hamiltonian systems. Here the iteration theory means the index theory of iterations of periodic solutions and symplectic matrix paths. (2) to serve as a reference book on these topics. There are many different ways to introduce the index theory for symplectic paths in order to establish Morse type index theory of Hamiltonian systems. In this book, I have chosen a relatively elementary way, i.e., the homotopy classification method of symplectic matrix paths. It depends only on linear algebra, point set topology, and certain basic parts of linear functional analysis. I have tried to make this part of the book self-contained and at the same time include all of the major results on these topics so that researchers and students interested in them can read it without substantial difficulties, and can learn the main results in this area for their possible applications.