Topology and Geometry for Physicists

by Charles Nash, Siddhartha Sen

Applications from condensed matter physics, statistical mechanics and elementary particle theory appear in the book. An obvious omission here is general relativity--we apologize for this. We originally intended to discuss general relativity. However, both the need to keep the size of the book within the reasonable limits and the fact that accounts of the topology and geometry of relativity are already available, for example, in The Large Scale Structure of Space-Time by S. Hawking and G. Ellis, made us reluctantly decide to omit this topic.

Genres: Mathematics, Physics

311 pages, Paperback

First published July 1, 1983

Reviews

[Erickson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Skipped Morse theory and instanton (plus the twistor version of it). There are some typos but not really something that bugs me a lot at this point.

The book is really good at getting the reader quick into the tools of topology and geometry which would normally take several textbooks to learn (or if you use one like Nakahara, you would need to plough through > 600 pages). When one has some rough idea about topology and differential geometry, this book is extremely helpful.

Nearer the end, it started to "degrade" because it makes assumptions about your knowledge that is getting wider and wider; Lie algebra suddenly needs to be well-understood, for instance (which is not covered in this text). So my personal feel is that this book is excellent up to the chapter on fibre bundles and by the time one reaches characteristic classes (which they did very well by the way, for making a case of computing it), one would probably need supplementary text. I believe a book at the level and nature of Nakahara or Frankel would be a good supplement.

Overall, a good book to refresh memory and try your hands on basic ideas of difficult topological and geometrical topics. Need other books to help if one were to master these tools.

[Lulu]

Geometry and topology for physicists