Oswald Veblen

Written in the wake of the advent of Relativity by an author who made important contributions to projective and differential geometry, and topology, this early Cambridge Tract in Mathematics and Theoretical Physics aimed to assist students of the time from the fields of differential geometry and mathematical physics. Beginning by introducing formal preliminaries, the text continues, bringing the underlying differential invariant theory that to this day remains relevant in a range of geometrical and physical applications, to the fore.

This book contains a set of axioms for differential geometry and develops their consequences up to a point where a more advanced book might reasonably begin. Analytical operations with co-ordinate systems are continually used in differential geometry, a typical process being to 'choose a co-ordinate system such that …' It is therefore natural to state the axioms in terms of an undefined class of 'allowable' co-ordinate systems, and to deduce the properties of the space from the nature of the transformations of co-ordinates permitted by the axioms. These earlier axioms are found to be adequate for the differential geometry of an open simply connected space, the most elementary theorems of which occupy the greater part of Chapters III–V. The more general axioms, in terms of allowable co-ordinate systems and without restrictions on the connectivity of the space, are given in Chapter IV.