Lie symmetries of geodesic equations and projective collineations (Q619546)

The authors express the infinitesimal symmetries of the geodesic equation of any Riemannian metric in terms of certain special infinitesimal projective collineations. Suppose that \(M\) is a Riemannian Einstein manifold, with nonzero scalar curvature. The authors prove that the infinitesimal symmetries of the geodesic equation of \(M\) are precisely the Killing vector fields. They calculate the infinitesimal symmetries of the geodesic equation for de Sitter and Gödel space-time.