Introduction to General Relativity

Following the approach of Lev Landau and Evgenii Lifshitz, this book introduces the theory of special and general relativity with the Lagrangian formalism and the principle of least action. This method allows the complete theory to be constructed starting from a small number of assumptions, and is the most natural approach in modern theoretical physics. The book begins by reviewing Newtonian mechanics and Newtonian gravity with the Lagrangian formalism and the principle of least action, and then moves to special and general relativity. Most calculations are presented step by step, as is done on the board in class. The book covers recent advances in gravitational wave astronomy and provides a general overview of current lines of research in gravity. It also includes numerous examples and problems in each chapter.

Cosimo Bambi is Xie Xide Junior Chair Professor at the Department of Physics at Fudan University (Shanghai, China) and a Humboldt Fellow at Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen (Tübingen, Germany). He received his PhD from Ferrara University (Italy) in 2007, and was a postdoc at Wayne State University (Michigan), IPMU at The University of Tokyo (Japan), and at LMU Munich (Germany). He moved to Fudan University at the end of 2012 under the Thousand Young Talents Program. In 2016, he was awarded with a JSPS fellowship to visit Japan. In 2018, he received the Xu Guangqi Award (for the best Italian researcher in China). He regularly serves as referee for journals like PRL, ApJ, JHEP, JCAP, etc. and as proposal reviewer for the Chang Jiang Scholars Program (China), Czech Science Foundation (Czech Republic), German Research Foundation (Germany), and National Research Foundation (South Africa). His research interests cover several areas in gravity, cosmology, and high-energy astrophysics. He has published more than 100 papers on refereed journals as first or corresponding author, has over 3,000 citations, and his h-index is 34. He has authored two books, and edited one volume (in ASSL) with Springer.