Differential Forms

Abstract

This chapter is still devoted to the fundamentals of differential geometry, but here the deviation from the standard presentations is already large. In the section on vector bundles we treat the Lie derivative for natural vector bundles, i.e. functors which associate vector bundles to manifolds and vector bundle homomorphisms to local diffeomorphisms. We give a formula for the Lie derivative of the form of a commutator, but it involves the tangent bundle of the vector bundle in question. So we also give a careful treatment to this situation. The Lie derivative will be discussed in detail in chapter XI; here it is presented in a somewhat special situation as an illustration of the categorical methods we are going to apply later on. It follows a standard presentation of differential forms and a thorough treatment of the Frölicher-Nijenhuis bracket via the study of all graded derivations of the algebra of differential forms. This bracket is a natural extension of the Lie bracket from vector fields to tangent bundle valued differential forms. We believe that this bracket is one of the basic structures of differential geometry (see also section 30), and in chapter III we will base nearly all treatment of curvature and the Bianchi identity on it.