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Concept
Conformal map
Summary
In mathematics, a conformal map is a function that locally preserves angles, but not necessarily lengths.
More formally, let and be open subsets of . A function is called conformal (or angle-preserving) at a point if it preserves angles between directed curves through , as well as preserving orientation. Conformal maps preserve both angles and the shapes of infinitesimally small figures, but not necessarily their size or curvature.
The conformal property may be described in terms of the Jacobian derivative matrix of a coordinate transformation. The transformation is conformal whenever the Jacobian at each point is a positive scalar times a rotation matrix (orthogonal with determinant one). Some authors define conformality to include orientation-reversing mappings whose Jacobians can be written as any scalar times any orthogonal matrix.
For mappings in two dimensions, the (orientation-preserving) conformal mappings are precisely the locally invertible complex analytic functions. In three and higher dimensions, Liouville's theorem sharply limits the conformal mappings to a few types.
The notion of conformality generalizes in a natural way to maps between Riemannian or semi-Riemannian manifolds.
If is an open subset of the complex plane , then a function is conformal if and only if it is holomorphic and its derivative is everywhere non-zero on . If is antiholomorphic (conjugate to a holomorphic function), it preserves angles but reverses their orientation.
In the literature, there is another definition of conformal: a mapping which is one-to-one and holomorphic on an open set in the plane. The open mapping theorem forces the inverse function (defined on the image of ) to be holomorphic. Thus, under this definition, a map is conformal if and only if it is biholomorphic. The two definitions for conformal maps are not equivalent. Being one-to-one and holomorphic implies having a non-zero derivative. However, the exponential function is a holomorphic function with a nonzero derivative, but is not one-to-one since it is periodic.
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