Riemannian Geometry In An Orthogonal Frame

Book excerpt: Foreword by S S Chern In 1926-27, Cartan gave a series of lectures in which he introduced exterior forms at the very beginning and used extensively orthogonal frames throughout to investigate the geometry of Riemannian manifolds. In this course he solved a series of problems in Euclidean and non-Euclidean spaces, as well as a series of variational problems on geodesics. In 1960, Sergei P Finikov translated from French into Russian his notes of these Cartan's lectures and published them as a book entitled Riemannian Geometry in an Orthogonal Frame. This book has many innovations, such as the notion of intrinsic normal differentiation and the Gaussian torsion of a submanifold in a Euclidean multidimensional space or in a space of constant curvature, an affine connection defined in a normal fiber bundle of a submanifold, etc. It has now been translated into English by Vladislav V Goldberg, currently Distinguished Professor of Mathematics at the New Jersey Institute of Technology, USA, who also edited the Russian edition.