# Tag Info

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### How was Einstein led to make a contact with Differential Geometry for his theory of General Relativity?

Einstein himself told the story in his Kyoto address of 1922, which I quote from Pais's biography titled Subtle is the Lord: "If all systems are equivalent, then Euclidean geometry cannot hold in ...
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### What was the motivation for the development of modern, intrinsic, differential geometry?

Tensor calculus was developed about 20 years before the general relativity by Ricci and Levi-Civita, starting around 1890, under the name of absolute differential calculus. It was motivated by Riemann'...
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### When and how was the geometric understanding of gauge theories developed?

I will focus on the history before the Yang-Mills paper. The first harbinger was the introduction of the scalar potential for the gravitational field by Lagrange in 1773. In 1864 Maxwell introduced ...
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### When and how was the geometric understanding of gauge theories developed?

I'll focus on the geometry of Yang-Mills theories specifically, but as Conifold's answer points out, gauge theories were studied geometrically long before the work of Yang and Mills. The foreward to ...
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### How come we attribute the general theory of relativity to Einstein?

This seems a bit of a naive question to me. Einstein had been working on this problem for several years (starting as early as 1907), and had developed much of the physics by 1912. He greatly struggled ...
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### How was curvature originally defined and calculated?

Apollonius (c. 262–190 BC) "calculated" curvature of conic sections implicitly when solving the problem of drawing normals to them in book V of Conica, but he did not think of it as a ...
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### Who do I blame for non-Euclidean geometry?

Technically, the first was Lobachevski (published in 1829-30). Bolyai was independent (published in 1832). Gauss discovered it independently of both (not published). A more complicated research is ...
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### Help translate from German a quote by Hermann Weyl in Space Time Matter

One must firmly protest these orgies of a formalism with which even technicians are getting harassed today. (Literally: of the formalism, with which one is beginning to harass even technicians today.)...
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### How come we attribute the general theory of relativity to Einstein?

First, to echo and elaborate on previous answers, Hilbert only appeared on the scene during the last few minutes of the last act, so to speak. Einstein made his first step towards the General Theory ...
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### Was Euler's theorem in differential geometry motivated by matrices and eigenvalues?

You can read about the origin of Euler's 1760 study on curvature in Mathematical Masterpieces: Further Chronicles by the Explorers (page 187 and following). The idea of curvature goes back several ...
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