Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
In the mathematical field of differential geometry, the Riemann curvature tensor or Riemann–Christoffel tensor (after Bernhard Riemann and Elwin Bruno Christoffel) is the most common way used to express the curvature of Riemannian manifolds. It assigns a tensor to each point of a Riemannian manifold (i.e., it is a tensor field).
Let be a smooth manifold and let be a one-parameter family of Riemannian or pseudo-Riemannian metrics. Suppose that it is a differentiable family in the sense that for any smooth coordinate chart, the derivatives v i j = ∂ ∂ t ( ( g t ) i j ) {\displaystyle v_{ij}={\frac {\partial }{\partial t}}{\big (}(g_{t})_{ij}{\big )}} exist and are ...
Although individually, the Weyl tensor and Ricci tensor do not in general determine the full curvature tensor, the Riemann curvature tensor can be decomposed into a Weyl part and a Ricci part. This decomposition is known as the Ricci decomposition, and plays an important role in the conformal geometry of Riemannian manifolds.
Every Riemannian symmetric space is homogeneous, and consequently is geodesically complete and has constant scalar curvature. However, Riemannian symmetric spaces also have a much stronger curvature property not possessed by most homogeneous Riemannian manifolds, namely that the Riemann curvature tensor and Ricci curvature are parallel.
Given a Riemannian metric g, the scalar curvature Scal is defined as the trace of the Ricci curvature tensor with respect to the metric: [1] = . The scalar curvature cannot be computed directly from the Ricci curvature since the latter is a (0,2)-tensor field; the metric must be used to raise an index to obtain a (1,1)-tensor field in order to take the trace.
In 1906, L. E. J. Brouwer was the first mathematician to consider the parallel transport of a vector for the case of a space of constant curvature. [4] [5] In 1917, Levi-Civita pointed out its importance for the case of a hypersurface immersed in a Euclidean space, i.e., for the case of a Riemannian manifold embedded in a "larger" ambient space ...
Broadly, one could analogize the role of the Ricci curvature in Riemannian geometry to that of the Laplacian in the analysis of functions; in this analogy, the Riemann curvature tensor, of which the Ricci curvature is a natural by-product, would correspond to the full matrix of second derivatives of a function.
The fundamental objects are called the Riemannian metric and the Riemann curvature tensor. For the surface (two-dimensional) case, the curvature at each point can be reduced to a number (scalar), with the surfaces of constant positive or negative curvature being models of the non-Euclidean geometries.