Tristan Needham

Complex Analysis is the powerful fusion of the complex numbers (involving the 'imaginary' square root of -1) with ordinary calculus, resulting in a tool that has been of central importance to science for more than 200 years. This book brings this majestic and powerful subject to life by consistently using geometry (not calculation) as the means of explanation. The 501 diagrams of the original edition embodied geometrical arguments that (for the first time) replaced the long and often opaque computations of the standard approach, in force for the previous 200 years, providing direct, intuitive, visual access to the underlying mathematical reality. This new 25th Anniversary Edition introduces brand-new captions that fully explain the geometrical reasoning, making it possible to read the work in an entirely new way—as a highbrow comic book!

Complex Analysis is the powerful fusion of the complex numbers (involving the 'imaginary' square root of -1) with ordinary calculus, resulting in a tool that has been of central importance to science for more than 200 years. This book brings this majestic and powerful subject to life by consistently using geometry (not calculation) as the means of explanation. The 501 diagrams of the original edition embodied geometrical arguments that (for the first time) replaced the long and often opaque computations of the standard approach, in force for the previous 200 years, providing direct, intuitive, visual access to the underlying mathematical reality. This new 25th Anniversary Edition introduces brand-new captions that fully explain the geometrical reasoning, making it possible to read the work in an entirely new way—as a highbrow comic book!

An inviting, intuitive, and visual exploration of differential geometry and formsVisual Differential Geometry and Forms fulfills two principal goals. In the first four acts, Tristan Needham puts the geometry back into differential geometry. Using 235 hand-drawn diagrams, Needham deploys Newton’s geometrical methods to provide geometrical explanations of the classical results. In the fifth act, he offers the first undergraduate introduction to differential forms that treats advanced topics in an intuitive and geometrical manner.Unique features of the first four acts include: four distinct geometrical proofs of the fundamentally important Global Gauss-Bonnet theorem, providing a stunning link between local geometry and global topology; a simple, geometrical proof of Gauss’s famous Theorema Egregium; a complete geometrical treatment of the Riemann curvature tensor of an n-manifold; and a detailed geometrical treatment of Einstein’s field equation, describing gravity as curved spacetime (General Relativity), together with its implications for gravitational waves, black holes, and cosmology. The final act elucidates such topics as the unification of all the integral theorems of vector calculus; the elegant reformulation of Maxwell’s equations of electromagnetism in terms of 2-forms; de Rham cohomology; differential geometry via Cartan’s method of moving frames; and the calculation of the Riemann tensor using curvature 2-forms. Six of the seven chapters of Act V can be read completely independently from the rest of the book.Requiring only basic calculus and geometry, Visual Differential Geometry and Forms provocatively rethinks the way this important area of mathematics should be considered and taught.

An inviting, intuitive, and visual exploration of differential geometry and formsVisual Differential Geometry and Forms fulfills two principal goals. In the first four acts, Tristan Needham puts the geometry back into differential geometry. Using 235 hand-drawn diagrams, Needham deploys Newton’s geometrical methods to provide geometrical explanations of the classical results. In the fifth act, he offers the first undergraduate introduction to differential forms that treats advanced topics in an intuitive and geometrical manner.Unique features of the first four acts include: four distinct geometrical proofs of the fundamentally important Global Gauss-Bonnet theorem, providing a stunning link between local geometry and global topology; a simple, geometrical proof of Gauss’s famous Theorema Egregium; a complete geometrical treatment of the Riemann curvature tensor of an n-manifold; and a detailed geometrical treatment of Einstein’s field equation, describing gravity as curved spacetime (General Relativity), together with its implications for gravitational waves, black holes, and cosmology. The final act elucidates such topics as the unification of all the integral theorems of vector calculus; the elegant reformulation of Maxwell’s equations of electromagnetism in terms of 2-forms; de Rham cohomology; differential geometry via Cartan’s method of moving frames; and the calculation of the Riemann tensor using curvature 2-forms. Six of the seven chapters of Act V can be read completely independently from the rest of the book.Requiring only basic calculus and geometry, Visual Differential Geometry and Forms provocatively rethinks the way this important area of mathematics should be considered and taught.