No label defined (Q4354484)

The original edition of this book, in Romanian, appeared about 10 years ago. In spite of being in a language less familiar, the original book has been used worldwide as a unique source for certain ideas in differential geometry. The appearance of this English edition, translated by the authors, is particularly welcome. The book begins with a general discussion of connections in vector bundles and connections in tangent bundles. The idea of a distinguished or \(d\)-connection is then developed. This is a particularly clear way of expressing geometry which preserves by parallelism horizontal and vertical distributions on a vector bundle. For example, torsion and curvature are easier to understand in this context. The discussion leads naturally to a concise introduction to Finsler geometry and then to a generalization of Finsler space which the authors call Lagrange space. This is basically Finsler space without a homogeneity requirement. These Lagrange spaces are interesting both mathematically and physically. Their exposition is mainly due to the authors. The last chapter is a special discussion of physical applications by Satoshi Ikeda. This chapter was already in English in the original edition. A minor flaw of the book is the lack of an index. This is mitigated by the logical organization of the material. A new list of references to recent work is also helpful.