Introduction to smooth manifolds (Q4779969)

This book is designed as a first-year graduate text on smooth manifold theory, for students who already have a solid acquaintance with basic topology (including the fundamental group and covering spaces), abstract linear algebra and advanced multivariable calculus (including multiple integrals). As the author himself remarks, its guiding philosophy and scope is similar to the first volume of \textit{M. Spivak}'s classical text [A Comprehensive Introduction to Differential Geometry, Publish or Perish, Berkeley, Second Edition (1979; Zbl 0439.53001), First Edition (1970; Zbl 0202.52001)], though perhaps a bit more dense. It introduces and uses all of the standard tools of smooth manifold theory and offers the proofs of all of its fundamental theorems. Let us give a short description of the contents that include twenty chapters and an Appendix. In the first six chapters the author introduces the reader to the concept of smooth manifold through abstract definitions and through many relevant examples. In particular, he introduces at this early stage the concept of Lie group, whose properties will be gradually described as one progresses with the study of the manifolds. The author carefully develops the incipient natural constructions on smooth manifolds, i.e. the tangent and cotangent bundles, and finds it appropriate to introduce at this early point the concept of abstract vector bundle. The seventh to the tenth chapters present the proof of the inverse function theorem and its corollaries. This tool is applied primarily to the study of submanifolds (including Lie subgroups and vector bundles), quotients of manifolds obtained by Lie group actions, embeddings of smooth manifolds into Euclidean spaces (the proof of the Whitney embedding theorem), and approximation of continuous maps by smooth ones (the proof of the Whitney approximation theorems). The eleventh to sixteenth chapters introduce tensor fields, Riemannian metrics, differential forms, orientations, integration on manifolds (including the proof of Stokes's theorem), Riemannian manifolds (including the divergence theorem) and on Lie groups, de Rham cohomology and the Mayer-Vietoris technique, and conclude with the elegant proof of the de Rham theorem due to \textit{G. E. Bredon} [Topology and Geometry, Springer-Verlag, New York (1993; Zbl 0791.55001)]. The seventeenth chapter deals with integral curves and flows of vector fields. One proves that every smooth vector field determines a unique maximal flow and one examines conditions under which a vector field generates a global flow as well as the local behavior of flows. Flows are used in the last three chapters of the book to define Lie derivatives of vector fields (and more generally of tensor fields and differential forms) and to point out some of their applications to geometry and to symplectic manifolds, to study tangent distributions (in the sense of Chevalley) and foliations on smooth manifolds, and to describe in some detail the relationship between Lie groups and their Lie algebras. Along the way, a local form as well as a global form of the Frobenius theorem are proven. There is an Appendix reviewing the prerequisites on some fundamental facts from basic topology, abstract linear algebra, and multivariable calculus that are used throughout the book. Each chapter contains exercises, mostly to fill in the gaps in the text and many of them being routine verifications, and ends with a section containing a collection of longer and harder questions, some of them with hints, labeled as problems, the thourough study of which with the reader understand this material deeply. This is a clearly and carefully written book in the author's usual elegant style. The exposition is crisp and contains a lot of pictures and intuitive explanations of how one should think geometrically about some abstract concepts. It could profitably be used by beginning graduate students who want to undertake a deeper study of specialized applications of smooth manifold theory.