Differential Geometry Kreyszig 22.pdf
Angeles Bartholomew
I found this thread What is a covector and what is it used for?, in which the top answer states "Many of us got very confused with the notions of tensors in differential geometry not because of its algebraic structure or definition, but because of confusing old notation".
Towards this purpose I want to know what are the most important basic theorems in differential geometry and differential topology. For a start, for differential topology, I think I must read Stokes' theorem and de Rham theorem with complete proofs.
ADDITION: I have compiled what I think is a definitive collection of listmanias at Amazon for a best selection of books an references, mostly in increasing order of difficulty, in almost any branch of geometry and topology. In particular the books I recommend below for differential topology and differential geometry; I hope to fill in commentaries for each title as I have the time in the future.
To really understand the classic and intuitive motivations for modern differential geometry you should master curves and surfaces from books like Toponogov's "Differential Geometry of Curves and Surfaces" and make the transition with Kühnel's "Differential Geometry - Curves, Surfaces, Manifolds". Other nice classic texts are Kreyszig "Differential Geometry" and Struik's "Lectures on Classical Differential Geometry".
For modern differential geometry I cannot stress enough to study carefully the books of Jeffrey M. Lee "Manifolds and Differential Geometry" and Liviu Nicolaescu's "Geometry of Manifolds". Both are deep, readable, thorough and cover a lot of topics with a very modern style and notation. In particular, Nicolaescu's is my favorite. For Riemannian Geometry I would recommend Jost's "Riemannian Geometry and Geometric Analysis" and Petersen's "Riemannian Geometry". A nice introduction for Symplectic Geometry is Cannas da Silva "Lectures on Symplectic Geometry" or Berndt's "An Introduction to Symplectic Geometry". If you need some Lie groups and algebras the book by Kirilov "An Introduction to Lie Groops and Lie Algebras" is nice; for applications to geometry the best is Helgason's "Differential Geometry - Lie Groups and Symmetric Spaces".
For differential geometry, I don't really know any good texts. Besides the standard Spivak, the other canonical choice would be Kobayashi-Nomizu's Foundations of Differential Geometry, which is by no means easy going. There is a new book by Jeffrey Lee called Manifolds and Differential Geometry in the AMS Graduate Studies series. I have not looked at it personally in depth, but it has some decent reviews. It covers a large swath of the differential topology, and also the basic theory of connections. (As a side remark, if you like doing computations, Kobayashi's original paper "Theory of connections" is not very hard to read, and may be a good starting place before you jump into some of the more special-topic/advanced texts like Kolar, Slovak, and Michor's Natural operations in differential geometry.)
I'm doing exactly the same thing as you right now. I'm self-learning differential topology and differential geometry. To those ends, I really cannot recommend John Lee's "Introduction to Smooth Manifolds" and "Riemannian Manifolds: An Introduction to Curvature" highly enough. "Smooth Manifolds" covers Stokes Theorem, the de Rham theorem and more, while "Riemnannian Manifolds" covers connections, metrics, etc.
For differential geometry it's much more of a mixed bag as it really depends on where you want to go. I've always viewed Ehresmann connections as the fundamental notion of connection. But it suits my tastes. But I don't know much in the way of great self-learning differential geometry texts, they're all rather quirky special-interest textbooks or undergraduate-level grab-bags of light topics. I haven't spent any serious amount of time with the Spivak books so I don't feel comfortable giving any advice on them.
About 50 of these books are 20th or 21st century books which would be useful as introductions to differential geometry. I give some brief indications of the contents and suitability of most of the books in this list.
Sundararaman Ramanan, Global calculus - a high-brow exposition of basic notions in differential geometry. A unifying topic is that of differential operators (done in a coordinate-free way!) and their symbols.
However, the above books only lay out the general notions and do not develop any deep theorems about the geometry of a manifold you may wish to study. At this point the tree of differential geometry branches out into various topics like Riemannian geometry, symplectic geometry, complex differential geometry, index theory, etc.
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