Book review
Torsion and the second fundamental form for distributions
The second fundamental form of Riemannian geometry is generalised to the case of a manifold with a linear connection and an integrable distribution. This bilinear form is generally not symmetric and its skew part is the torsion. The form itself is closely related to the shape map of the connection. The codimension one case generalises the traditional shape operator of Riemannian geometry.
The inverse problem in the calculus of variations: new developments
We deal with the problem of determining the existence and uniqueness of Lagrangians for systems of second order ordinary differential equations. A number of recent theorems are presented, using exterior differential systems theory (EDS). In particular, we indicate how to generalise Jesse Douglas’s famous solution for . We then examine a new class of solutions in arbitrary dimension and give some non-trivial examples in dimension 3.
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