Tentative daily calendar

This is a very rough tentative calendar and continuous changes are to be expected.
Announcements made in class always take priority.


Last updates:
Feb 23: Updated outline of calendar thru' mid-March.
Jan 19: Published this www-page -- the calendar is still the one of an old class in differential geometry. Expect updates for the current class later this week.

This page is under construction


 
Week 1 M Jan 19 Martin Luther King Holiday
T Jan 20 Introduction: "Geometry" and "Differential".
Curves in the plane and 3-space.
Th Jan 22 class postponed. no meeting today
 
Week 2 T Jan 27 Frenet Serret formulas intrinsic properties, invariance under ...
Th Jan 29 Abstract manifolds: motivation and tasks to be addressed
 
Week 3 T Feb 3 Manifolds and local coordinate charts
Embedded surfaces versus intrinsically defined manifolds
Th Feb 5
 
Week 4 T Feb 10 Tangent spaces
"Arrows" versus equivalence classes of curves,
differential operators and abstract notion
Th Feb 12
 
Week 5 T Feb 17 Tangent bundles and tangent maps
...
Th Feb 19
 
Week 6 T Feb 24 Cotangent bundle and pull-backs of differential forms.
Th Feb 26 Flows of vector fields
 
Week 7 T Mar 3 Lie derivatives and integrability
Frobenius' theorem
Reachable sets and controllability
Th Mar 5
 
  T Mar 10 Spring Break
Th Mar 12
 
Week 8 T Mar 17 Tensor bundles and exterior derivatives
Frobenius' theorem revisited.
Observation spaces, state-space realizations of I/O systems.
Th Mar 19
 
Calendar under construction. Below week-2-week topics from 2007 class on geometry
 
Week 9 T Mar 24 Riemannian metrics
Notion of distance on surfaces and abstract manifolds
Th Mar 26
 
Week 10 T Mar 27 Geodesics
Smoothness! Christoffel symbols

Apr 1: Class Withdrawal Deadline (online)

Th Mar 29
Apr 3   Course withdrawal deadline: in person
Apr 5   Course withdrawal deadline: online
 
Week 11 T Apr 7 Parallel transport
Levi-Civita connection

Abstracting the ideas behind geodesics
Th Apr 9
 
Week 12 T Apr 14 Gaussian curvature
Possible notions of curvature. Invariance. Weingarten map?
Possible project: read historical work
Th Apr 16
 
Week 13 T Apr 21 Gauss Bonnet theorem
The crowning conclusions: Connecting geometry and topology
Th Apr 23
 
Week 14 T Apr 28 Outlook: Many connections
Not necessarily Riemannian settings.
Possibly: Control theory or principal bundles (outlook only!)
Th Apr 30
 
Week 15 T May 5 Outlook / presentation continued
W May 6 Reading Day
Th May 7 12:20 - 2:10 Final Exam
Room to be confirmed (or: 2:10 p.m. Final Project due)
 
Week 16 Th May 14 Commencement