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Differential and Riemannian Manifolds (Graduate Texts in Mathematics)

Differential and Riemannian Manifolds (Graduate Texts in Mathematics)

List Price: $54.95
Your Price: $54.95
Product Info Reviews

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Rating: 3 stars
Summary: Not a "first book", ok as reference
Review: Lang's book is definitely not useful as textbook for classes or for self-guided study (learnt this the hard way). He is rather abstract and provides zero motivation for the theory. The book is obviously made for people who learnt diff. geometry elsewhere but want to read a cleaner and more modern treatment. To this end, Lang's book is useful. The best part is that manifolds are infinite-dimensional right away. This is probably the only reason for buying Lang instead of/in addition to Dieudonne as a reference. Otherwise, the book is a little too terse; fiber bundles are merely hinted at. Moreover, I think some of the proofs are unnecessarily complicated, such as the one for Frobenius theorem.

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: Modern, but....
Review: This book is a proper subset of Lang's later book "Fundamentals of Differential Geometry (Graduate Texts in Mathematics, 191)".

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: Modern, but....
Review: This book is a proper subset of Lang's later book "Fundamentals of Differential Geometry (Graduate Texts in Mathematics, 191)".

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Maybe Lang's best book.
Review: Well, we have here another book on differential manifolds, and another book by Serge Lang. Lang is well-known by writing (lots of) books on different topics in analysis and algebra, all of them in a quite "Bourbaki-like" style: attaining maximum generality, with less motivation than most students would like. This is no surprise, because Lang himself is a Bourbakist.

So, what's interesting about D&RM? It's a book very much like Lang's other books, only that here the Bourbakist's approach is quite happy: it's one of the very few books on his subject to present most of his results in infinite-dimensional (Banach) version, a must if you are interested in nonlinear functional analysis or dynamical systems. The exposition is very clean and clear: Lang uses categories all the way to estabilish the main relations between the different differential-topological structures and tools, and he does not hesitate in stating and using tools from analysis, such as Lebesgue measure and functional analysis' main theorems. The proofs are very polished and, in a certain sense, beautiful, a philosophy that permeates most of the book. As if it weren't enough, the book still contains an appendix with a Von Neumann's seminar about the spectral theorem.

All things considered, it's a quite "state-of-the-art" book about the basics of differential manifolds, from an analyst's perspective. This perspective provides differential topology with a lot of additional clarity and power. I don't know if most physicists would like this book, because its motivations, if any, are sparse and sometimes quite obscure, as long as physical applications are concerned. For a mathematician, however, this book is a gem: it's Lang at its best, and the perfect opening door to global analysis (the nonlinear analysis on infinite dimensional manifolds, a vast field of mathematics that encompasses dynamical systems and nonlinear functional analysis). Despite all that, I would also recommend to physicists to at least tackle this book, as an antidote to all the crap that the so-called "differential topology for physicists" books put on their heads, because I don't know a cleaner and more precise presentation of differential manifolds so far.


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