Edmond Bonan (born 27 January 1937 in Haifa, Mandatory Palestine) is a French mathematician, known particularly for his work on special holonomy. Although not a single example of G2 manifold or Spin(7) manifold had been discovered until thirty years later, Edmond Bonan nonetheless made a useful contribution by showing in 1966, that such manifolds would carry at least a parallel 4-form, and would necessarily be Ricci-flat, [1] propelling them as candidates for string theory. [2]
After completing his undergraduate studies at the École polytechnique, Bonan went on to write his 1967 University of Paris doctoral dissertation in Differential geometry under the supervision of André Lichnerowicz. [3] From 1968 to 1997, he held the post of lecturer and then professor at the University of Picardie Jules Verne in Amiens, where he currently holds the title of professor emeritus. Early in his career, from 1969 to 1981, he also lectured at the École Polytechnique.
Charles Ehresmann was a German-born French mathematician who worked in differential topology and category theory.
In the mathematical field of differential geometry, Ricci-flatness is a condition on the curvature of a Riemannian manifold. Ricci-flat manifolds are a special kind of Einstein manifold. In theoretical physics, Ricci-flat Lorentzian manifolds are of fundamental interest, as they are the solutions of Einstein's field equations in a vacuum with vanishing cosmological constant.
In differential geometry, the holonomy of a connection on a smooth manifold is the extent to which parallel transport around closed loops fails to preserve the geometrical data being transported. Holonomy is a general geometrical consequence of the curvature of the connection. For flat connections, the associated holonomy is a type of monodromy and is an inherently global notion. For curved connections, holonomy has nontrivial local and global features.
In differential geometry, a hyperkähler manifold is a Riemannian manifold endowed with three integrable almost complex structures that are Kähler with respect to the Riemannian metric and satisfy the quaternionic relations . In particular, it is a hypercomplex manifold. All hyperkähler manifolds are Ricci-flat and are thus Calabi–Yau manifolds.
In differential geometry, a G2 manifold or Joyce manifold is a seven-dimensional Riemannian manifold with holonomy group contained in G2. The group is one of the five exceptional simple Lie groups. It can be described as the automorphism group of the octonions, or equivalently, as a proper subgroup of special orthogonal group SO(7) that preserves a spinor in the eight-dimensional spinor representation or lastly as the subgroup of the general linear group GL(7) which preserves the non-degenerate 3-form , the associative form. The Hodge dual, is then a parallel 4-form, the coassociative form. These forms are calibrations in the sense of Reese Harvey and H. Blaine Lawson, and thus define special classes of 3- and 4-dimensional submanifolds.
In differential geometry, a quaternion-Kähler manifold (or quaternionic Kähler manifold) is a Riemannian 4n-manifold whose Riemannian holonomy group is a subgroup of Sp(n)·Sp(1) for some . Here Sp(n) is the sub-group of consisting of those orthogonal transformations that arise by left-multiplication by some quaternionic matrix, while the group of unit-length quaternions instead acts on quaternionic -space by right scalar multiplication. The Lie group generated by combining these actions is then abstractly isomorphic to .
The Séminaire Nicolas Bourbaki is a series of seminars that has been held in Paris since 1948. It is one of the major institutions of contemporary mathematics, and a barometer of mathematical achievement, fashion, and reputation. It is named after Nicolas Bourbaki, a group of French and other mathematicians of variable membership.
Continuation of the Séminaire Nicolas Bourbaki programme, for the 1950s.
In mathematics, a Spin(7)-manifold is an eight-dimensional Riemannian manifold whose holonomy group is contained in Spin(7). Spin(7)-manifolds are Ricci-flat and admit a parallel spinor. They also admit a parallel 4-form, known as the Cayley form, which is a calibrating form for a special class of submanifolds called Cayley cycles.
In differential geometry, a hypercomplex manifold is a manifold with the tangent bundle equipped with an action by the algebra of quaternions in such a way that the quaternions define integrable almost complex structures.
Thierry Aubin was a French mathematician who worked at the Centre de Mathématiques de Jussieu, and was a leading expert on Riemannian geometry and non-linear partial differential equations. His fundamental contributions to the theory of the Yamabe equation led, in conjunction with results of Trudinger and Schoen, to a proof of the Yamabe Conjecture: every compact Riemannian manifold can be conformally rescaled to produce a manifold of constant scalar curvature. Along with Yau, he also showed that Kähler manifolds with negative first Chern classes always admit Kähler–Einstein metrics, a result closely related to the Calabi conjecture. The latter result, established by Yau, provides the largest class of known examples of compact Einstein manifolds. Aubin was the first mathematician to propose the Cartan–Hadamard conjecture.
Marcel Berger was a French mathematician, doyen of French differential geometry, and a former director of the Institut des Hautes Études Scientifiques (IHÉS), France.
In differential geometry, a -structure is an important type of G-structure that can be defined on a smooth manifold. If M is a smooth manifold of dimension seven, then a G2-structure is a reduction of structure group of the frame bundle of M to the compact, exceptional Lie group G2.
In the mathematical field of differential geometry, a calibrated manifold is a Riemannian manifold (M,g) of dimension n equipped with a differential p-formφ (for some 0 ≤ p ≤ n) which is a calibration, meaning that:
In mathematics, a nearly Kähler manifold is an almost Hermitian manifold , with almost complex structure , such that the (2,1)-tensor is skew-symmetric. So,
In differential geometry, a quaternionic manifold is a quaternionic analog of a complex manifold. The definition is more complicated and technical than the one for complex manifolds due in part to the noncommutativity of the quaternions and in part to the lack of a suitable calculus of holomorphic functions for quaternions. The most succinct definition uses the language of G-structures on a manifold. Specifically, a quaternionic n-manifold can be defined as a smooth manifold of real dimension 4n equipped with a torsion-free -structure. More naïve, but straightforward, definitions lead to a dearth of examples, and exclude spaces like quaternionic projective space which should clearly be considered as quaternionic manifolds.
Chern's conjecture for affinely flat manifolds was proposed by Shiing-Shen Chern in 1955 in the field of affine geometry. As of 2018, it remains an unsolved mathematical problem.
Sylvestre F. L. Gallot is a French mathematician, specializing in differential geometry. He is an emeritus professor at the Institut Fourier of the Université Grenoble Alpes, in the Geometry and Topology section.
Paul Gauduchon is a French mathematician, known for his work in the field of differential geometry. He is particularly known for his introduction of Gauduchon metrics in hermitian geometry. His textbook on spectral geometry, written with Marcel Berger and Edmond Mazet, is a standard reference in the field.