Introductory Manifolds

Addressed to both pure and applied probabilitists, including graduate students, this text is a pedagogically-oriented introduction to the Schwartz-Meyer second-order geometry and its use in stochastic calculus. P.A. Meyer has contributed an appendix: "A short presentation of stochastic calculus" presenting the basis of stochastic calculus and thus making the book better accessible to non-probabilitists also. No prior knowledge of differential geometry is assumed of the reader: this is covered within the text to the extent.

As an introductory work, this book contains the elementary materials in map theory, including
embeddings of a graph, abstract maps, duality, orientable and non-orientable maps, isomorphisms of maps and the enumeration of rooted or unrooted maps, particularly, the joint tree representation of an embedding of a graph on two dimensional manifolds, which enables one to make the complication much simpler on map enumeration. All of these are valuable for researchers and students in combinatorics, graphs and low dimensional topology.

The present book is the first of its kind in dealing with topological quantum field theories and their applications to topological aspects of four manifolds. It is not only unique for this reason but also because it contains sufficient introductory material that it can be read by mathematicians and theoretical physicists.

The present book is the first of its kind in dealing with topological quantum field theories and their applications to topological aspects of four manifolds. It is not only unique for this reason but also because it contains sufficient introductory material that it can be read by mathematicians and theoretical physicists. On the one hand, it contains a chapter dealing with topological aspects of four manifolds, on the other hand it provides a full introduction to supersymmetry.