The literature on natural bundles and natural operators in differential geometry, was until now, scattered in the mathematical journal literature. This book is the first monograph on the subject, collecting this material in a unified presentation. The book begins with an introduction to differential geometry stressing naturality and functionality, and the general theory of connections on arbitrary fibered manifolds. The functional approach to classical natural bundles is extended to a large class of geometrically interesting categories. Several methods of finding all natural operators are given and these are identified for many concrete geometric problems. After reduction each problem to a finite order setting, the remaining discussion is based on properties of jet spaces, and the basic structures from the theory of jets are therefore described here too in a self-contained manner. The relations of these geometric problems to corresponding questions in mathematical physics are brought out in several places in the book, and it closes with a very comprehensive bibliography of over 300 items. This book is a timely addition to literature filling the gap that existed here and will be a standard reference on natural operators for the next few years.

The aim of this work is threefold: First it should be a monographical work on natural bundles and natural op erators in differential geometry. This is a field which every differential geometer has met several times, but which is not treated in detail in one place. Let us explain a little, what we mean by naturality. Exterior derivative commutes with the pullback of differential forms. In the background of this statement are the following general concepts. The vector bundle A kT* M is in fact the value of a functor, which associates a bundle over M to each manifold M and a vector bundle homomorphism over f to each local diffeomorphism f between manifolds of the same dimension. This is a simple example of the concept of a natural bundle. The fact that exterior derivative d transforms sections of A kT* M into sections of A k+1T* M for every manifold M can be expressed by saying that d is an operator from A kT* M into A k+1T* M."

Parabolic geometries encompass a very diverse class of geometric structures, including such important examples as conformal, projective, and almost quaternionic structures, hypersurface type CR-structures and various types of generic distributions. The characteristic feature of parabolic geometries is an equivalent description by a Cartan geometry modeled on a generalized flag manifold (the quotient of a semisimple Lie group by a parabolic subgroup). Background on differential geometry, with a view towards Cartan connections, and on semisimple Lie algebras and their representations, which play a crucial role in the theory, is collected in two introductory chapters. The main part discusses the equivalence between Cartan connections and underlying structures, including a complete proof of Kostant's version of the Bott - Borel - Weil theorem, which is used as an important tool. For many examples, the complete description of the geometry and its basic invariants is worked out in detail. The constructions of correspondence spaces and twistor spaces and analogs of the Fefferman construction are presented both in general and in several examples. The last chapter studies Weyl structures, which provide classes of distinguished connections as well as an equivalent description of the Cartan connection in terms of data associated to the underlying geometry. Several applications are discussed throughout the text.