Summary

From the preface: Many years have passed since the first edition. However, the encouragements of various readers and friends have persuaded us to write this third edition. During these years, Riemannian Geometry has undergone many dramatic developments. Here is not the place to relate them. The reader can consult for instance the recent book [Br5]. of our "mentor" Marcel Berger. However, Riemannian Geometry is not only a fascinating field in itself. It has proved to be a precious tool in other parts of mathematics. In this respect, we can quote the major breakthroughs in four-dimensional topology which occurred in the eighties and the nineties of the last century (see for instance [L2]). These have been followed, quite recently, by a possibly successful approach to the Poincaré conjecture. In another direction, Geometric Group Theory, a very active field nowadays (cf. [Gr6]), borrows many ideas from Riemannian or metric geometry. But let us stop hogging the limelight. This is justa textbook. We hope that our point of view of working intrinsically with manifolds as early as possible, and testing every new notion on a series of recurrent examples (see the introduction to the first edition for a detailed description), can be useful both to beginners and to mathematicians from other fields, wanting to acquire some feeling for the subject.