Basic notions

Abstract

The aim of this chapter is to set the ground for the remainder of this work. We present our conventions and notations in Section 1.1. We review some basic facts about the topology of manifolds in Section 1.2. Lorentzian manifolds and spacetimes are introduced in Section 1.3. Elementary facts concerning the Levi-Civita connection and its curvature are reviewed in Section 1.4. Some properties of geodesics, as needed in the remainder of this book, are presented in Section 1.5. The formalism of moving frames is outlined in Section 1.6, where it is used to calculate the curvature of metrics of interest.