A Beginner's Guide to Holomorphic Manifolds
This is page Printer: Opaque this A Beginner’s Guide to Holomorphic Manifolds Andrew D. Hwang This is page i Printer: Opaque this Preface This book constitutes notes from a one-semester graduate course called “Complex Manifolds and Hermitian Differential Geometry” given during the Spring Term, 1997, at the University of Toronto. Its aim is not to give a thorough treatment of the algebraic and differential geometry of holomorphic manifolds, but to introduce material of current interest as quickly and concretely as possible with a minimum of prerequisites. There are several excellent references available for the reader who wishes to see subjects in more depth. The coverage includes standard introductory analytic material on holo- morphic manifolds, sheaf cohomology and deformation theory, differential geometry of vector bundles (Hodge theory, and Chern classes via curva- ture), and some applications to the topology and projective embeddability of K¨ahlerian manifolds. The final chapter is a short survey of extremal K¨ahler metrics and related topics, emphasizing the geometric and “soft” analytic aspects. There is a large number of exercises, particularly for a book at this level. The exercises introduce several specific but colorful ex- amples scattered through “folklore” and “the literature.” Because there are recurrent themes and varying viewpoints in the subject, some of the exercises overlap considerably. The course attendees were mostly advanced graduate students in math- ematics, but it is hoped that these notes will reach a wider audience, in- cluding theoretical physicists. The “ideal” reader would be familiar with smooth manifolds (charts, forms, flows, Lie groups, vector bundles), differ- ential geometry (metrics, connections, and curvature), and basic algebraic topology (simplicial and singular cohomology, the long exact sequence, and ii the fundamental group), but in reality the prerequisites are less strenuous, though a good reference for each subject should be kept at hand.
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