Course on General Relativity and Differential Geometry

{ May 20th suggested assignment is found at the bottom. }

Join us for a structured study of general relativity, including important concepts from differential geometry. We’re following the MIT OpenCourseWare General Relavitity class, which includes comprehensive video lectures, lecture notes, and assignments. These will be supplemented by the various textbooks and resources that you and your fellow students bring to the group.

What to expect – Here is our current format:

• Before each meeting, we will assign ourselves a lecture to watch and a set of exercises that everyone is invited to try for next time. (All of this is optional and there is never anything expected or required – this is a self-study group!)
• During the meeting, one or more volunteers will teach the lesson(s) in their own words, and others will present their solutions to (or attempts at!) the exercises.
• Between meetings, we will collaborate through our chat server and/or small study sessions during "office hours". New members should especially take advantage of these to get up to speed. Ask us for details and links to these fantastic resources!

Additional resources that many of us are using:

• Modern General Relativity by Guidry
• Visual Differential Geometry and Forms by Needham
• Gravitation by Misner, Thorne, and Wheeler

If you have just found this event and are worried that you're too far behind, don't worry! Our meetups are expressly structured to encourage and invite people to join us at any point and at any level of prior knowledge, as long as you've had at least some exposure to calculus and basic physics in the past. You are definitely welcome here!

We also maintain a live chat server for staying in touch between meetups. Ask us for a link.

This event is one of the many other collaborative study tracks in our Physics With Friends community. Check out all of our other events to find additional physics topics that you might want to study together!

Please note that the Relativity & Differential Geometry meetup series is a highly mathematical meetup for everyone who is serious about learning the advanced branches of math and physics that one needs to master in order to deeply understand the equations and applications of relativity. It is not a general discussion group for popular physics topics or sci-fi tangents. For casual physics chat, please attend our regular "Discuss Physics and Make Friends" event, held every third Wednesday of the month.

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Suggested homework for May 20th:

• Re-watch Lecture 8 ("Lie Transport, Killing Vectors, Tensor Densities")
• Find and solve problems from an outside source on parallel transport, Lie transport, and/or Lie derivatives
• Solve problems 1 and 2 in problem set 3 if you haven't already
• IF YOU ARE NEW HERE: Just come! Don't worry about any of this.