Natural Operations in Differential Geometry

by Ivan Kolar, Peter W. Michor, Jan Slovak

eBook Details:

Publisher: Springer 1993
ISBN/ASIN: 3540562354
ISBN-13: 9783540562351
Number of pages: 437

eBook Description:
This book tries to be a rather comprehensive textbook on all basic structures from the theory of jets which appear in different branches of differential geometry. The book begins with an introduction to differential geometry stressing naturality and functionality, and the general theory of connections on arbitrary fibered manifolds. The functional approach to classical natural bundles is extended to a large class of geometrically interesting categories. Several methods of finding all natural operators are given and these are identified for many concrete geometric problems. After reduction each problem to a finite order setting, the remaining discussion is based on properties of jet spaces, and the basic structures from the theory of jets are therefore described here too in a self-contained manner.