Book Reviews 285

Clemency Montelle
E-mail address: clemency.montelle@canterbury.ac.nz

Available online 5 May 2017

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.hm.2017.03.006

Géométrie et Topologie différentielles (1918–1932).

By Renaud Chorlay. Paris (Hermann). 2015. ISBN 978-2-7056-8106-7. 364 pp. 45¤

The book under review is a source book collecting 12 papers from the fields of differential geometry and
differential topology in the period 1918–1932. The book is rather unusual in form, as will be explained be-
low; in the opinion of the reviewer, the sources covered are highly interesting, and the annotational material
is very illuminating. The author is a French historian of mathematics currently affiliated to SPHERE (Paris
Diderot) specialized in the history of mathematics in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. His former work
(2007, 2010) is on topics closely related to the subject matter of the book under review.
The papers printed here include three papers by Hermann Weyl on infinitesimal geometry, the space
problem and the theory of Lie groups (1918, 1922, 1924), six papers by Elie Cartan on generalized spaces
and related developments involving groups (1922a, 1922b, 1922c, 1925a, 1925b, 1928), and four papers on
other topics: Schreier on the theory of continuous groups (1928), Hopf on Riemannian manifolds (1932),
Threlfall on Morse theory (1939), and Veblen and Whitehead on axioms for differential geometry (1931).
Threlfall’s paper is a report on work done mostly by Morse in the 1920s, which explains why it has been
included even though it doesn’t belong to the period indicated, according to its date of publication.
There seem to be no compelling criteria for the choice of the included papers and the period covered;
Chorlay himself is quite explicit about this fact (p. 5). Perhaps one can say the following: Chorlay focused
on a series of important conceptual developments in the fields and the period covered; in many cases, he
didn’t choose the “seminal” (and often long and technical) papers themselves, but rather made use of notes
from the Comptes rendus and of conference manuscripts, both of which are instances where the author has
opportunity to explain novel ideas to a more general audience. This allowed Chorlay both to cover more
material and to include papers more easily readable (with less technical background needed). Even if all
these papers have been accessible before (in digitized form or included in collected works), some might
well have escaped the attention even of experts in the field. This is especially true of Threlfall’s paper, which
was published in a didactical journal but excellently gives a general idea of Morse theory to a wider public.
In sum, the book under review is excellent reading; it is however not obvious how to “get the larger pic-
ture”, i.e. how to identify the narrative Chorlay wants to give by his choice of material. Let me paraphrase
p. 5 of the introduction where Chorlay points to two themes: 1) diversity of geometries or of generalized
spaces (ways of defining a geometrical structure and of organizing the system of geometries) and 2) in-
terlinkage of the three levels of infinitesimal, local and global (the 1920s being the moment when global
problems made their appearance in several disciplines). The motives for the conceptual innovations come
both from outside mathematics (relativity theory) and from its inside (theory of manifolds).
Chorlay organizes the material roughly chronologically and combines the 12 papers into 8 chapters.
Among the source texts, those originally not written in French have been translated by the author, 5 from
German and one from English. The quality of the translations is very high; in cases where translation of
particular expressions was difficult, Chorlay signals the original wording in brackets. Chorlay also occa-
sionally corrects errors in existing translations (on p. 55 concerning the French translation of Weyl’s Raum,
Zeit, Materie, for instance). It is certainly one of the major merits of the book to make thus accessible some
important German sources to French-reading scholars.
286 Book Reviews

The structure of each of the eight chapters is as follows: the chapter begins with an introductory pre-
sentation of the paper and its historical context; then follows the source text itself, and then “notes and
compléments”, which contain longer explanatory notes by Chorlay, but also extracts from other original
papers helpful for the understanding of the primary sources. The explicit aims of these notes and comple-
ments are “to clarify the origins of a problem, to signal variants of formulation, to give the details of a proof,
to furnish elements of the reception of a text” (p. 5). I can say without hesitation that Chorlay throughout the
book manages to achieve these aims in a helpful and interesting way, with sometimes surprising insights.
Within this structure, the source texts themselves cover 132 pages in all (ranging from 3 to 28 pages,
but most often between 10 and 16 pages per paper), while the remainder is covered by introductory pre-
sentations (38 pages), notes and complements (155 pages), introduction and bibliography. Thus, the book
contains considerable material in addition to the sources, where some of that material is commentary and
exposition by Chorlay, while some of it is reproductions from other sources (the longest of which rival in
length to the shortest source text included).
Chorlay refers to the notes and complements in the presentations and the source texts with Arabic nu-
merals in brackets; the presentations contain also footnotes with roman capital numerals, while original
footnotes in the source are given with Arabic numerals. Thus, the reader has to keep some notational pecu-
liarities in mind. And since the longer notes are to be found in the “notes and compléments” parts and thus
work like endnotes, the reader has to turn quite some pages in order to follow up all the notes.
Special emphasis is given to the first and longest paper included, Weyl’s paper on purely infinitesimal
geometry (1918). Chorlay justifies this emphasis by the difficulty and the importance of the paper. In fact,
the work done by Chorlay for disclosing the line of thought is impressive. Among the many important
issues which Chorlay explains with clarity, let me mention only Weyl’s ingenuous conception of gauge
symmetry residing on the idea that in a differential manifold in Weyl’s sense, the theory must be invariant
by multiplication of the ds 2 by a number (such that choices of unit lengths in different points are wholly
independent of each other). Chorlay also pursues this conceptual development through the various editions
of Raum, Zeit, Materie. Only in rare places one would have wished even more clarity; for instance, the
term “geodesic” apparently can have different meanings in Weyl’s work, but this reviewer is not able, after
reading the relevant passages of Chorlay’s book, to seize the difference of these meanings (compare p. 28
with p. 54).
The book is also worth reading for people interested in later developments in the history of mathemat-
ics. Personally, I found it striking that Weyl on p. 26f introduces a notion of commutativity which comes
close, on the level of parallel transport of vectors, to what later became the commutativity of a diagram of
mappings, even if this may be to some extent an anachronistic reading. Another matter relevant for later
developments and touched upon repeatedly in the book is the origin of the notion of structure in mathemat-
ics. One of the germs of this terminology seems to be that the original German “Zusammensetzung” of a
Lie group has been translated as “structure” into French (see Hawkins, 2000, p. 85). Now, it is exciting to
see how Schreier uses both the traditional and a broader, more modern terminology in a quote from a 1926
paper reproduced on p. 133 of Chorlay’s book.
One of the declared aims of the book is to furnish a fundamental corpus for those who wish to start a
philosophical reflection on the mathematical approach to space (p. 6). Many of the source texts included are
highly useful for such an enterprise. But in my opinion, Chorlay does not himself engage deeply in such a
philosophical reflection. This is understandable in the context of a source book, but is to be regretted at least
at one place. The introduction of Weyl (1918) (which precisely touches at such philosophical questions) is
not commented at all by Chorlay (except a technical hint).
Read as a whole, the book gives its reader a very good overview over the developments covered. Alas,
due to the absence of an index, it is much less appropriate for occasional consultation. For instance, one
learns from the bibliography that work by Ossian Bonnet must be discussed somewhere in the volume, but
has to spend some time to find the corresponding chapter (on Hopf). The same applies to various authors
 Book Reviews 287

discussed in the book; it is a pity since the remarks made by Chorlay in these respects would be of quite
some interest but now run the risk to pass by unnoticed.
There are some minor criticisms as to the typesetting (which is very nicely made in general). First,
I would have preferred to have chapter and section titles in the page headers, rather than the title of Chorlay’s
book and the title of the section. Secondly, there is a considerable number of misprints in the mathematical
formulae (most of which will be, however, identified at once by the reader with the necessary mathematical
background). A nearly systematic error is the reproduction of Greek as Latin letters in in-text formulae,
perhaps due to software problems. Some of the misprints prohibit understanding, like in formula (2) on
p. 118. On p. 55, we find a note [8] which apparently is absent from the text itself.
To sum up, the book is strongly recommended to everyone interested in the development of mathematics
in the first half of the twentieth century in general, but especially to those interested in the history of
differential methods in geometry and topology in this period.

References

Cartan, Elie, 1922a. Sur une généralisation de la notion de courbure de Riemann et les espaces à torsion. C. R. Acad.
Sci. 174, 593–595.
Cartan, Elie, 1922b. Sur les espaces conformes généralisés et l’univers optique. C. R. Acad. Sci. 174, 857–860.
Cartan, Elie, 1922c. Sur les équations de structure des espaces généralisés et l’expression analytique du tenseur d’E-
instein. C. R. Acad. Sci. 174, 1104–1108.
Cartan, Elie, 1925a. La théorie des groupes et les recherches récentes de géometrie différentielle. In: Proceedings ICM
Toronto, vol. 1, pp. 85–94.
Cartan, Elie, 1925b. Les groupes d’holonomie des espaces généralisés et l’analysis situs. Assoc. Fr. Grenoble, 47–49.
Cartan, Elie, 1928. Sur les nombres de Betti des espaces de groupes clos. C. R. Acad. Sci. 187, 196–198.
Chorlay, Renaud, 2007. L’émergence du couple local/global dans les théories géométriques, de Bernhard Riemann à
la théorie des faisceaux 1851–1953. PhD thesis. Paris VII, direction Christian Houzel.
Chorlay, Renaud, 2010. From problems to structures: the Cousin problems and the emergence of the sheaf concept.
Arch. Hist. Exact Sci. 64 (1), 173.
Hawkins, Thomas, 2000. Emergence of the theory of Lie groups. An Essay in the History of Mathematics, 1869–1926.
Springer, New York.
Hopf, Heinz, 1932. Differentialgeometrie und topologische Gestalt. Jahresber. DMV 41, 209–228.
Schreier, Otto, 1928. Über neuere Untersuchungen in der Theorie der kontinuierlichen Gruppen. Jahresber. DMV 37,
113–122.
Threlfall, William, 1939. Le calcul des variations global. Enseign. Math. 38, 189–208.
Veblen, Oswald, Whitehead, J.H.C., 1931. A set of axioms for differential geometry. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. 17,
551–561.
Weyl, Hermann, 1918. Reine Infinitesimalgeometrie. Math. Z. 2, 384–411. GA 2, pp. 1–28.
Weyl, Hermann, 1922. Das Raumproblem. Jahresber. DMV 31, 205–221. GA 2, pp. 329–344.
Weyl, Hermann, 1924. Das Gruppentheoretische Fundament der Tensorrechnung. Nachr. Ges. Wiss. Gött., 218–224.
GA 2, pp. 461–467.

Ralf Krömer
Arbeitsgruppe Didaktik und Geschichte der Mathematik,
Bergische Universität Wuppertal,
Gaußstraße 20, D-42119 Wuppertal, Germany
E-mail address: rkroemer@uni-wuppertal.de
Available online 9 February 2017

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.hm.2017.01.002