On Riemannian manifolds of four dimensions

Abstract

Introduction. It is well known that in three-dimensional elliptic or spherical geometry the so-called Clifford's parallelism or parataxy has many interesting properties. A group-theoretic reason for the most important of these properties is the fact that the universal covering group of the proper orthogonal group in four variables is the direct product of the universal covering groups of two proper orthogonal groups in three variables. This last-mentioned property has no analogue for orthogonal groups in n ( > 4 ) variables. On the other hand, a knowledge of three-dimensional elliptic or spherical geometry is useful for the study of orientable Riemannian manifolds of four dimensions, because their tangent spaces possess a geometry of this kind. I t is the purpose of this note to give a study of a compact orientable Riemannian manifold of four dimensions at each point of which is attached a three-dimensional spherical space. This necessitates a more careful study of spherical geometry than hitherto given in the literature, except, so far as the writer is aware, in a paper by E. Study [2] . 2 0ur main result consists of two formulas, which express two topological invariants of a compact orientable differentiable manifold of four dimensions as integrals over the manifold of differential invariants constructed from a Riemannian metric previously given on the manifold. These two topological invariants have a linear combination which is the Euler-Poincare characteristic.