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Schouten, Levi-Civita and the notion of parallelism in Riemannian geometry. (English) Zbl 1354.01013

The paper reviews some of the unpublished correspondence between Levi-Civita and Schouten in 1918–19 that documents the independent discoveries of the geometrical meaning of the covariant derivative. The implications of the different technical choices made by the two men are explored and some of the correspondence is transcribed.

MSC:

01A60 History of mathematics in the 20th century
53-03 History of differential geometry

Biographic References:

Levi-Civita, Tullio; Schouten, Willem
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References:

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