Fundamentals of Differential Geometry

This text provides an introduction to basic concepts in differential topology, differential geometry, and differential equations, and some of the main basic theorems in all three areas: for instance, the existence, uniqueness, and smoothness theorems for differential equations and the flow of a vector field; the basic theory of vector bundles including the existence of tubular neighborhoods for a submanifold; the calculus of differential forms; basic notions of simplistic manifolds, including the canonical 2-form; sprays and covariant derivatives for Riemannian and pseudo-Riemannian manifolds; and applications to the exponential map, including the Cartan-Hadamard theorem and the first basic theorem of calculus of variations. Although the book grew out of the author's earlier book Differential and Riemannian Manifolds, the focus has now changed from the general theory of manifolds to general differential geometry, and includes new chapters on Jacobi lifts, tensorial splitting of the double tangent bundle, curvature and the variation formula, a generalization of the Cartan-Hadamard theorem, the semiparallelogram law of Bruhat-Tits and its equivalence with seminegative curvature and the exponential map distance increasing property, a major example of seminegative curvature (the space of positive definite symmetric real matrices), automorphisms and symmetries, and immersions and submersions. These are all covered for infinite-dimensional manifolds, modeled on Banach and Hilbert spaces, at no cost in complications, and some gain in the elegance of the proofs. In the finite-dimensional case, differential forms of top degree are discussed, leading to Stokes' theorem (even for manifolds with singular boundary), and several of its applications to the differential or Riemannian case. Basic formulas concerning the Laplacian are given, exhibiting several of its features in immersions and submersions.