Differential Forms

Henri Cartan

• Publisher: Dover Publications
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780486450100
• eBook ISBN: 9780486139111
• Topic: Mathematics
• Subtopic: Game Theory
• Index: Mathematics

"Cartan's work provides a superb text for an undergraduate course in advanced calculus, but at the same time it furnishes the reader with an excellent foundation for global and nonlinear algebra."—Mathematical Review
"Brilliantly successful."—Bulletin de l'Association des Professeurs de Mathematiques
"The presentation is precise and detailed, the style lucid and almost conversational . . . clearly an outstanding text and work of reference."—Annales
Cartan's Formes Differentielles was first published in France in 1967. It was based on the world-famous teacher's experience at the Faculty of Sciences in Paris, where his reputation as an outstanding exponent of the Bourbaki school of mathematics was first established.
Addressed to second- and third-year students of mathematics, the material skillfully spans the pure and applied branches in the familiar French manner, so that the applied aspects gain in rigor while the pure mathematics loses none of its dignity. This book is equally essential as a course text, as a work of reference, or simply as a brilliant mathematical exercise.

Chapter 1

Differential forms

1. Multilinear alternating mappings

1.1 Definition of an alternating multilinear mapping

Much of the following will be of interest purely from the point of view of that division of algebra which is concerned with the study of vector spaces over an arbitrary commutative field K (no restriction being placed on the characteristic of the field). However, we shall confine ourselves in exposition to normed vector spaces over the fields R or C: to illustrate, let us take R.

Suppose then that E, F are two normed vector spaces. We have already considered (Chap. 1, § 1.8, Differential Calculus) the normed vector space

_p(E; F) of the p-linear continuous mappings E^p → F; for p = 1 we write for simplicity

(E; F); for p = 0 we define

₀(E; F) = F. We also considered the vector subspace of

_p(E; F) formed by the p-linear symmetric mappings. We shall now introduce a second subspace

of

_p(E; F).

DEFINITION. A mapping f ∈

_p(E; F) is called alternating if its value f(x_1, ..., x_p) is null whenever x_i = x_i+1 for at least one i (1 ≤ i < p). (We agree that for p = 1 every linear function E → F is an alternation.)

It is evident that the p-linear alternating mappings form a vector subspace of

_p(E; F); we denote it by

Then

; by definition we put

The vector subspace

is closed in

_P(E; F) ; indeed, suppose f ∈

_p(E; F) is the limit of a sequence f_n ∈

: then lim_n→∞ || f

f_n || = 0; a fortiori, for x₁, . . ., x_p ∈ E, the limit of ƒ_n(x₁, ..., x_p) is ƒ(x₁, ... , x_p). Thus if x_i = x_i+1, it follows that

Q.E.D.

Before stating further properties of multilinear alternating mappings we require a few preliminaries concerning permutation groups.

1.2 Permutation groups

Let

_p denote th...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Chapter 1 - Differential forms
• Chapter 2 - Elements of the calculus of variations
• Chapter 3 - Applications of the moving frame method to the theory of curves and surfaces
• Index
• Bibliography
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