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Differential Geometry + General Relativity Immersion Course

posted by CoolHand on Tuesday April 07 2015, @03:58PM   
from the I-can-really-learn-my-maths-and-sciences-now dept.

cosurgi writes:

If you ever wanted to learn General Relativity, now here's your chance. The caveat is that first you must learn differential geometry. But it's not difficult, really. Only lots of hard work, but not difficult. I was attending this February such a course. This course is fully documented: there are recordings of all lectures, and of tutorials with solutions (also the .pdf files with practice questions). For easier access you can also visit the The WE-Heraeus International Winter School on Gravity and Light YouTube channel.

You should know though that this material on the internet is not everything we were doing there, the biggest omission are the advanced tutorials, which were done in groups and couldn't be filmed. Also their solutions were too difficult to be "quickly" filmed like the tutorials that have videos. However there's hope that advanced tutorials will also be put online some time later this year (as promised by the organizers). In that case I'll submit a follow up story.

I must tell you that attending this course was really a great experience, and Prof. F. P. Schuller is in fact on of the best lecturers I have ever met.

• Re:you must learn differential geometry Re:you must learn differential geometry (Score: 3, Interesting) by FatPhil on Tuesday April 07 2015, @08:45PM

  by FatPhil (863) <{pc-soylent} {at} {asdf.fi}> on Tuesday April 07 2015, @08:45PM (#167586) Homepage

  Watching the first lecture now - he's a bloody excellent lecturer. Then again, that could be because I recognise everything from 25 years back. I'm not sure I could do the exercises though...

  --
  Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves

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• Re:you must learn differential geometry (Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Thursday April 09 2015, @08:59PM

  by hendrikboom (1125) on Thursday April 09 2015, @08:59PM (#168493) Homepage Journal

  I'm in the first lecture now. I find it easy because I recognise it from 50 years back. I don't think it'll stay that easy when I get the the differential geometry.

  There's another way of viewing topology in which open sets are *not* fundamental, but instead you use an apartness relation. I find it easier to understand, because one of the basic concepts is the inherent limits of practical computation. See Frank Waaldijk's book Natural Topology, at least for the first chapter or so. See http://www.fwaaldijk.nl/mathematics.html [fwaaldijk.nl] for context and links. It's constructive math.

  I'm curious how much of what they do would still go though with the so-called natural topology.

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