Connection (mathematics) - Historical Survey of Connections

Historical Survey of Connections

Historically, connections were studied from an infinitesimal perspective in Riemannian geometry. The infinitesimal study of connections began to some extent with Christoffel. This was later taken up more thoroughly by Gregorio Ricci-Curbastro and Tullio Levi-Civita (Levi-Civita & Ricci 1900) who observed in part that a connection in the infinitesimal sense of Christoffel also allowed for a notion of parallel transport.

The work of Levi-Civita focused exclusively on regarding connections as a kind of differential operator whose parallel displacements were then the solutions of differential equations. As the twentieth century progressed, Élie Cartan developed a new notion of connection. He sought to apply the techniques of Pfaffian systems to the geometries of Felix Klein's Erlangen program. In these investigations, he found that a certain infinitesimal notion of connection (a Cartan connection) could be applied to these geometries and more: his connection concept allowed for the presence of curvature which would otherwise be absent in a classical Klein geometry. (See, for example, (Cartan 1926) and (Cartan 1983).) Furthermore, using the dynamics of Gaston Darboux, Cartan was able to generalize the notion of parallel transport for his class of infinitesimal connections. This established another major thread in the theory of connections: that a connection is a certain kind of differential form.

The two threads in connection theory have persisted through the present day: a connection as a differential operator, and a connection as a differential form. In 1950, Jean-Louis Koszul (Koszul 1950) gave an algebraic framework for regarding a connection as a differential operator by means of the Koszul connection. The Koszul connection was both more general than that of Levi-Civita, and was easier to work with because it finally was able to eliminate (or at least to hide) the awkward Christoffel symbols from the connection formalism. The attendant parallel displacement operations also had natural algebraic interpretations in terms of the connection. Koszul's definition was subsequently adopted by most of the differential geometry community, since it effectively converted the analytic correspondence between covariant differentiation and parallel translation to an algebraic one.

In that same year, Charles Ehresmann (Ehresmann 1950), a student of Cartan's, presented a variation on the connection as a differential form view in the context of principal bundles and, more generally, fibre bundles. Ehresmann connections were, strictly speaking, not a generalization of Cartan connections. Cartan connections were quite rigidly tied to the underlying differential topology of the manifold because of their relationship with Cartan's equivalence method. Ehresmann connections were rather a solid framework for viewing the foundational work of other geometers of the time, such as Shiing-Shen Chern, who had already begun moving away from Cartan connections to study what might be called gauge connections. In Ehresmann's point of view, a connection in a principal bundle consists of a specification of horizontal and vertical vector fields on the total space of the bundle. A parallel translation is then a lifting of a curve from the base to a curve in the principal bundle which is horizontal. This viewpoint has proven especially valuable in the study of holonomy.