Lectures on Classical Differential Geometry

Rating:
Summary: Struik's book - a classic on classical differential geometry
Review: I simply cannot believe I am the first reviewer of this book!This book should be on the shelf of every mathematician interested in geometry, every computer graphics specialist, everyone interested in solid modelling. For ten bucks, you get a great summary of a wide range of topics in "classical differential geometry" -- the stuff geometers were interested in one hundred years ago. Today it's gauge and string theory -- but the topics discussed in this book are timeless, and many have seen remarkable renaissances in recent years. It is a wonderful little book ... I am using it to teach a basic differential geometry course next year.

Rating:
Summary: Good treatment of classical differential geometry
Review: Struik's book provides solid coverage of curve and surface theory from the classical point of view, i.e. the kind of stuff Monge, Serret, Frenet and Gauss did. I agree that the book should be on the shelves of mathematicians. A number of classical topics are simply not in vogue these days, and one can find them discussed at length in Struik, or in the exercises. In this sense the book certainly has a more geometric flavor than a number of contemporary texts.

However, Struik can't be used to understand what is happening today. For these purposes,books by O'Neill and do Carmo would be more appropriate. The discussion of manifolds and coordinate charts, the discussion of connection forms, differential forms, covariant derivatives, exterior derivatives, pullbacks and pushforwards can be found in these texts. This is the language of modern geometry.It leads on naturally to tensors, fibre bundles, de Rham cohomology and so on and so forth.The emphasis in modern geometry is on global phenomena, the interaction between local and global (e.g. Morse theory or De Rham cohomology), and the attempt to do everything in an algebraic setting (projective modules, spectral sequences, categories etc.) For this purpose, Struik is useless, though he does have some coverage of forms (he calls them by their earlier name of 'pfaffians').

The price of the book makes it an attractive purchase.