Introduction to Riemannian Manifolds

This text focuses on developing an intimate acquaintance with the geometric meaning of curvature and thereby introduces and demonstrates all the main technical tools needed for a more advanced course on Riemannian manifolds. It covers proving the four most fundamental theorems relating curvature and topology: the Gauss-Bonnet Theorem, the Cartan-Hadamard Theorem, Bonnet’s Theorem, and a special case of the Cartan-Ambrose-Hicks Theorem.

by Jacques Lafontaine (Author)
Introduces manifolds in the most direct way possible and principally explores their topological properties

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.

This book is an introductory graduate-level textbook on the theory of smooth manifolds. Its goal is to familiarize students with the tools they will need in order to use manifolds in mathematical or scientific research–- smooth structures, tangent vectors and covectors, vector bundles, immersed and embedded submanifolds, tensors, differential forms, de Rham cohomology, vector fields, flows, foliations, Lie derivatives, Lie groups, Lie algebras, and more.