Commutative Geometries are Spin Manifolds

In [1], Connes presented axioms governing noncommutative geometry. He went on to claim that when specialised to the commutative case, these axioms recover spin or spinc geometry depending on whether the geometry is “real” or not. We attempt to flesh out the details of Connes’ ideas. As an illustration we present a proof of his claim, partly extending the validity of the result to pseudo-Riemannian spin manifolds. Throughout we are as explicit and elementary as possible.