Bernard Gostiaux, is a contemporary French mathematician.
B. Gostiaux is joint author of a book I have in my little mathematical library. This book, written in french and entitled Géométrie différentielle (differential geometry), was published in 1972. A search on the net shows that, since this date, Bernard Gostiaux published other books as single author and that the book I own was translated into english (with a 3rd author) under the title Differential Geometry: Manifolds, Curves, and Surfaces.
What is differential geometry ? Each time you use a map of a region of the world, you use differential geometry — a way to insert cartesian coordinates on something which is not ... cartesian, e. g. the surface of a sphere. But, "of course", this can be generalized to abstract numerical spaces, that is spaces whose elements are systems of numbers describing some reality. One can remark also that some vocabulary used by mathematicians in differential geometry is borrowed from geography : maps, atlasses, and used even in abstract case. According to my last infos, a student in mathematics, today, doesn't learn differential geometry before the 4th year in university.
P. M.
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