Handbook of Normal Frames and Coordinates
This book provides the first comprehensive and complete overview on results and methods concerning normal frames and coordinates in differential geometry, with emphasis on vector and differentiable bundles. The book can be used as a reference manual, for reviewing the existing results and as an introduction to some new ideas and developments. Virtually all essential results and methods concerning normal frames and coordinates are presented, most of them with full proofs, in some cases using new approaches.All classical results are expanded and generalized in various directions. For example, normal frames and coordinates are defined and investigated for different kinds of derivations, in particular for (possibly linear) connections on manifolds, with or without torsion, in vector bundles and on differentiable bundles; they are explored also for (possibly parallel) transports along paths in vector bundles. Theorems of existence, uniqueness and, possibly, holonomicity of normal frames and coordinates are proved; mostly, the proofs are constructive and some of their parts can be used independently for other tasks.
Material Inhomogeneities and their Evolution : A Geometric Approach
The first part of the book deals with the geometrical description of uniform bodies and their homogeneity (i.e., integrability) conditions. In the second part, a theory of material evolution is developed and its relevance in various applied contexts discussed. The necessary geometrical notions are introduced as needed in the first two parts but often without due attention to an uncompromising mathematical rigour. This task is left for the third part of the book, which is a highly technical compendium of those concepts of modern differential geometry that are invoked in the first two parts (differentiable manifolds, Lie groups, jets, principal fibre bundles, G-structures, connections, frame bundles, integrable prolongations, groupoids, etc.).
Basic bundle theory and K-Cohomology invariants
Based on several recent courses given to mathematical physics students, this volume is an introduction to bundle theory with the aim to provide newcomers to the field with solid foundations in topological K-theory. A fundamental theme, emphasized in the book, centers around the gluing of local bundle data related to bundles into a global object. One renewed motivation for studying this subject, which has developed for almost 50 years in many directions, comes from quantum field theory, especially string theory, where topological invariants play an important role.


