parent:: inculcation

  • A lot of these material is present in Napkin but it does not give enough page-length to fully grasp the whole topic, maybe?
  • shifrin-multivariable-mathematics does a good job at the calculus
  • Analysis by Herbert Amann and Joachim Escher Volume I or Rudin or Apostol contains the analysis

Derivatives, differential forms and beyond - YouTube

This is me explaining tensors, derivatives and differential forms, focusing mostly on motivation of the philosophy and also looking for no-brain symbolic calculation as a summary.

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total and directional derivative of functions

Total derivative of function

between finite-dim real normed vector spaces at a point is supposed to be a linear map

that “approximates” near . So if is a rotation, that near

should “look” like a rotation.

measurable functions and their integrals

AKA ”measure theory“.

differential forms, their integration and exterior derivative

We look at the (familiar) structure of

where .

Writing this in a different notation: for

and then continuing for

where we understand that the “wedge” works like the cross product

It is easily seen

doesn’t matter what’s inside the , a real function or the objects , or (called 0,1,2,3-forms respectively) when their components are differentiable functions.

We see this “exterior derivative”

thus “unifies” grad, curl and div and generalizes because it may be defined as

in any dimension.

But what are these

mean?


Integrating differential forms on chains (generalizing line, surface, volume integrals) is very simple

Here we have the fundamental theorem of calculus but generalized:


The de Rham complex

begs the question, when is a closed form exact (there exists such that ?)

The Poincare lemma says locally, any closed form is exact. Fine, if you’re happy with it. But there are closed forms whose integrals are not zero.

Hence they are not exact. Then when are closed forms exact, globally?

But plot twist! This question is purely topological!

things that requires a metric

Hodge duals

algebraic structures that naturally came up

  • Vector space, linear transformations
  • Tensor product of vector spaces
  • Algebras of a vector space: Tensor algebra, symmetric algebra, exterior algebra
  • Exact sequences, cohomology

vector fields and their flows

The relevant material is in inculcation-odes

vector fields and ODE dictionary

What we do is, write a differential equation like

for all so we have equations for variables and make it even more compact by

where is a vector field on the open domain .

This gives us a geometric pov on ODEs in , and we have a

solving differential equationsanalysis and geometry of vector fields
an equation a vector field
solutions of the equation integral curves of the vector field
how solutions depend on initial conditions flows of the vector field
conserved quantitiesintegrals of the vector field
(linearly) decoupling the differential equation (linear) coordinate transformation such that

We may convert ordinary differential equation of any order to first order by taking enough independent variables and defining them to be higher derivatives.

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in complex vector spaces

We may mimic everything above to complex vector spaces with a norm!

This for example leads to differential forms of the form

where .

This starts the study of complex analysis.

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