Differential Geometry of Surfaces - Riemannian Connection and Parallel Transport

Riemannian Connection and Parallel Transport

The classical approach of Gauss to the differential geometry of surfaces was the standard elementary approach which predated the emergence of the concepts of Riemannian manifold initiated by Bernhard Riemann in the mid-nineteenth century and of connection developed by Tullio Levi-Civita, Élie Cartan and Hermann Weyl in the early twentieth century. The notion of connection, covariant derivative and parallel transport gave a more conceptual and uniform way of understanding curvature, which not only allowed generalisations to higher dimensional manifolds but also provided an important tool for defining new geometric invariants, called characteristic classes. The approach using covariant derivatives and connections is nowadays the one adopted in more advanced textbooks.