This course is based on Sean Carroll's excellent introductory General Relativity text titled "Spacetime and Geometry". The intended audience has some experience with differential geometry and a good grounding in linear algebra and calculus. I may use other texts to supplement this course as it unfolds. This is an online course through UWA. I made a course website where I am posting pdf's of the notes I read and write in these lectures: http://www.supermath.info/GeneralRela... We'll begin with a treatment of special relativity and tensors on Minkowski space. I'll have to take a couple hours to treat classical field theory and Lagrangians. Then we review manifolds and calculus on curved spaces. Curvature and parallel transport and geodesics are derived or at least described. Then we state Einstein's field equations. Finally, Schwarzschild's solution, gravitational waves and maximally symmetric cosmological models round out our study this term. That's the goal. We'll see how it goes. Time permitting I'd like to understand more the tetrad formalism as it relates to the usual metric formulation. I think Carroll's text is more in the traditional metric formulation, but I took a course where differential forms were more central to the calculus of GR. It would be nice if I find time to discuss such matters toward the end of this course.
