• 한국수학사학회지
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• 제28권2호
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• pp.103-115
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• 2015

Contemporary differential geometry owes much to the theory of connections on the bundles over manifolds. In this paper, following the work of Gauss on surfaces in 3 dimensional space and the work of Riemann on the curvature tensors on general n dimensional Riemannian manifolds, we will investigate how differential geometry had been developed from mid 19th century to early 20th century through lives and mathematical works of Christoffel, Ricci-Curbastro and Levi-Civita. Christoffel coined the Christoffel symbol and Ricci used the Christoffel symbol to define the notion of covariant derivative. Levi-Civita completed the theory of absolute differential calculus with Ricci and discovered geometric meaning of covariant derivative as parallel transport.