The Geometry of Physics: An Introduction

The other reviews on this page give this book anywhere from 1 to 5 stars, and they are all correct in their own way. The book is inspired, deep and full of physics applications and insights. On the other hand, it skims over mathematical rigor to a large degree and focuses more on defining things, getting a feel for them and moving on to application. My advice: buy the book for its strengths, and read other books in parallel if you need more rigor. But still, buy it. Also, things can be confusing on the first two or three reads, but keep at it and you will be glad you did.

Differential geometry can be a very intimidating subject due to its heavy formalism. There are complete books (such as Kobayashi & Nomizu) very good as reference books, and there very few books that show the reader the picture behind the formulas. This is one such book. It tells you the intuition behind each construction and from this point of view it has many things in common with Arnold's famous book on Math. Methods in Classical Mechanics. But where as Arnold does not pay too much attention to formalism, this book achieves this task as well. It shows the reader how to do those impossible computations as well. This is definitely the first place to look at if you want to really learn differential geometry. If it seems difficult it is only because the subject is so.

Having taken a course out of Frankel (over the first 7 chapters) and now having used it in my senior project (topology of circuit analysis) I have to say that I love this book more by the day.Beforewarned it is not an easy text and you may have to read a section or a chapter over a hundred times. I have found that the material is dense and deep but in a way that welcomes effort. It is weak as far as rigor goes, but rigor can sometimes get in the way of understanding. Use this book alongside mathematics texts in topology, differential geometry and linear algebra and there is much to gain.For an undergraduate in mathematical physics (which I am) I have come to love this book I highly recommend it to a serious student.

I just finished a class in mathematical physics, and the text we used was Bamberg & Sternberg. I found that books treatment muddled and shortsighted. I mean, most of the linear algebra in the book deals only with 2 dimensional vector spaces. And the book was entirely useless in teaching differential forms... So i went looking for a better book to learn diferential forms. i didn t like flanders, it was too brief. this is the book for me. Don t expect to find any linear algebra here, but you d better know lin. alg. before you open this book. it is a challenging book, mathematically speaking, to study on your own (for a senior ugrad phys major, anyway), but it s treatment of forms and tensors is comprehensive, thorough, and detailed. and it shows you all the applications to relativity and electrodynamics, etc... it also builds up all the theory in with a background of differential geometry and topology, which are developed in the first chapter (but wasn t i glad to have already studied those topics beforehand!)this book prepared me for my mathematical physics class, plus gave me months of other material to study. it is difficult, so i read and reread each chapter.

This book introduces the methods of modern differential geometry and its uses in theoretical physics. The only prerequisites are a good working knowledge of multivariable calculus and linear algebra. The book is very much written for a physics audience(i.e. the book is actually READABLE unlike so many graduate texts in mathematics, and there is an emphasis in actually learning how to CALCULATE things, rather than just staring weary eyed at mathematicians beloved polished proofs that only they can understand) There is an emphasis on physical understanding of the mathematical structures and not too many proofs. Proving things is not a bad thing, but Dr. Frankel seems to know when its most appropriate to do this, and doesn't get too bogged down in the proofs. There is a lot of material in this book (22 chapters) The book is broken into 3 main sections. The first section is on "Manifolds, Tensors, Exterior Forms" Differential forms are not that familiar to physicsts and this is a great place to learn about them. There is very nice section on how to relate Forms to vector Analysis in 3 space that physicists love dearly (see page 94). The second section is on "Geometry and Topology"-mainly Riemannian Geometry and Some Algebraic Topology like DeRham Cohomology, and the third is "Lie Groups, bundles, and Chern Forms". In this third section there is a Chapter on the Dirac equation, and its relation to Spin geometry. The only thing that the book is lacking is that there is no complex algebraic geometry (for aspiring string theorists). It would be nice if some day Dr. Frankel could write a book on this subject, since at this time none exist. I think that even mathematicians could learn a thing or two from this book. Most of differential geometry originated in Physics, not the reverse.