Riemannian geometry of contact and symplectic manifolds / David E. Blair

Publisher’s description: This second edition, divided into fourteen chapters, presents a comprehensive treatment of contact and symplectic manifolds from the Riemannian point of view. The monograph examines the basic ideas in detail and provides many illustrative examples for the reader.

This second edition provides new material in most chapters, but a particular emphasis remains on contact manifolds. New principal topics include a complex geodesic flow and the accompanying geometry of the projectivized holomorphic tangent bundle and a complex version of the special directions discussed in Chapter 11 for the real case. Both of these topics make use of Étienne Ghys’s attractive notion of a holomorphic Anosov flow.

Researchers, mathematicians, and graduate students in contact and symplectic manifold theory and in Riemannian geometry will benefit from this work. A basic course in Riemannian geometry is a prerequisite.