Double Forms, Curvature Integrals and the Gauss-Bonnet Formula

Abstract

The Gauss-Bonnet Formula is a significant achievement in 19th century differential geometry for the case of surfaces and the 20th century cumulative work of H. Hopf, W. Fenchel, C. B. Allendoerfer, A. Weil and S.S. Chern for higher-dimensional Riemannian manifolds. It relates the Euler characteristic of a Riemannian manifold to a curvature integral over the manifold plus a somewhat enigmatic boundary term. In this paper, we revisit the formula using the formalism of double forms, a tool introduced by de Rham, and further developed by Kulkarni, Thorpe, and Gray. We explore the geometric nature of the boundary term and provide some examples and applications.