(1+1)-Dimensional Methods for General Relativity

This is an article contributed to the Brill Festschrift, in honor of the 60th birthday of Prof. D.R. Brill, which will appear in the Vol.2 of the Proceedings of the International Symposia on Directions in General Relativity. In this article we present the (1+1)-dimensional method for studying general relativity of 4-dimensions. We first discuss the general formalism, and subsequently draw attention to the algebraically special class of space-times, following the Petrov classification. It is shown that this class of space-times can be described by the (1+1)-dimensional Yang-Mills action interacting with matter fields, with the spacial diffeomorphisms of the 2-surface as the gauge symmetry. The constraint appears polynomial in part, whereas the non-polynomial part is a non-linear sigma model type in (1+1)-dimensions. It is also shown that the representations of $w_{\infty}$-gravity appear naturally as special cases of this description, and we discuss briefly the $w_{\infty}$-geometry in term of the fibre bundle.