A Student's Manual for A First Course in General Relativity

The perfect accompaniment to Schutz's textbook.

By Robert B. Scott

About the Book

This comprehensive student manual has been designed to accompany the leading textbook by Bernard Schutz, A First Course in General Relativity, and uses detailed solutions, cross-referenced to several introductory and more advanced textbooks, to enable self-learners, undergraduates and postgraduates to master general relativity through problem solving. The perfect accompaniment to Schutz's textbook, this manual guides the reader step-by-step through over 200 exercises, with clear easy-to-follow derivations.

Key Features

  • Detailed solutions to almost half of Schutz's exercises.
  • 125 new supplementary problems that address the subtle points of each chapter.
  • References to other mathematics and physics textbooks to help fill in the gaps needed to learn relativity.
  • Includes a Maple Worksheet with plots and numerical and symbolic computations.
  • Appendix with the metric, Christoffel symbols etc. for important spacetimes and other key mathematical results, likes series expansions, that are used repeatedly throughout the text.

News & Updates

New Edition Coming Next Year!

[June 25, 2025]: I am excited to announce that work is underway for the **Second Edition** of the textbook. A specific date is not yet planned for publication, but it will probably be early 2026. By the end of June, 2025 I will have submitted the first draft to CUP. The new edition will accompany the third edition of Schutz's textbook, which includes a new chapter, Chapter 12, on gravitational wave astronomy, and new material and exercises for the applications of general relativity covered in Schutz's chapters 9 through 13. As with the first edition of my book, I strive to provide detailed solutions to about half of the new exercises and to provide a similar number of new exercises. The new edition uses Mathematica rather than Maple. Thank you to the community for all the valuable feedback!

Errata (First Edition)

I am grateful to my readers for identifying errors. If you find an error not listed here, please contact me at Gab8piTab@gmail.com.

Exercise Location Correction Thanks to
Solution to Exer. 12.13 First equation, first line. The second term should be +, not -. Spotted by Alon Brook-Ray.

Resources & Files

Download supplementary materials for the book here.

  • Maple Worksheet
  • This is no longer supported.
  • Mathematica notebook
  • to support the new edition of the Student's Manual, which is to be published soon! (you need the proprietary software Wolfram Mathematica to open this)

Links