Curvature: A Variational Approach

Download or read book Curvature: A Variational Approach written by A. Agrachev and published by American Mathematical Soc.. This book was released on 2019-01-08 with total page 154 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The curvature discussed in this paper is a far reaching generalization of the Riemannian sectional curvature. The authors give a unified definition of curvature which applies to a wide class of geometric structures whose geodesics arise from optimal control problems, including Riemannian, sub-Riemannian, Finsler and sub-Finsler spaces. Special attention is paid to the sub-Riemannian (or Carnot–Carathéodory) metric spaces. The authors' construction of curvature is direct and naive, and similar to the original approach of Riemann. In particular, they extract geometric invariants from the asymptotics of the cost of optimal control problems. Surprisingly, it works in a very general setting and, in particular, for all sub-Riemannian spaces.