Differential geometry and Lie groups. A second course (Q786177)

This book is written as a second course on differential geometry. So the reader is supposed to be familiar with some themes from the first course on differential geometry -- the theory of manifolds and some elements of Riemannian geometry. In the first two chapters here some topics from linear algebra are provided -- a detailed exposition of tensor algebra and symmetric algebra, exterior tensor products and exterior algebra. These chapters may be useful when studying the material of this book for those students, who did not study these topics in their algebraic course. Some themes, which are covered in this book, are rather standard for books on differential geometry - they are differential forms, de Rham cohomology, integration on manifolds, connections and curvature in vector bundles, fibre bundles, principal bundles and metrics on bundles. But a number of topics discussed in this book are not always included in courses on differential geometry and are rarely contained in textbooks on differential geometry. The presence of these topics makes this book especially interesting for modern students. Here is a list of some such topics: an introduction to Pontrjagin classes, Chern classes, and the Euler class, distributions and the Frobenius theorem. Three chapters need to be highlighted separately. Chapter 7 -- spherical harmonics and an introduction to the representations of compact Lie groups. Chapter 8 -- operators on Riemannian manifolds: Hodge Laplacian, Laplace-Beltrami Laplacian, Bochner Laplacian. Chapter 11 -- Clifford algebras and groups, groups Pin\((n)\), Spin\((n)\). Not all statements in this book are given with proofs, for some only links to other textbooks are given. But the most important results are given here with complete proofs and accompanied by examples. Each chapter of this book ends with a list of interesting and sometimes very important problems. At the end of the book there is a very detailed list of the notation used (symbol index) and a detailed list (index) of the terms used.