This self-contained textbook presents an exposition of the well-known classical twodimensional geometries, such as Euclidean, spherical, hyperbolic and the locally Euclidean torus, and introduces the basic concepts of Euler numbers for topological triangulations and Riemannian metrics. The careful discussion of these classical examples provides students with an introduction to the more general theory of curved spaces developed later in the book, as represented by embedded surfaces in Euclidean 3-space, and their generalization to abstract surfaces equipped with Riemannian metrics. Themes running throughout include those of geodesic curves, polygonal approximations to triangulations, Gaussian curvature, and the link to topology provided by the Gauss–Bonnet theorem.
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