In mathematics, a manifold is a topological space that locally resembles Euclidean space near each point. More precisely, an -dimensional manifold, or -manifold for short, is a topological space with the property that each point has a neighborhood that is homeomorphic to an open subset of -dimensional Euclidean space.
One-dimensional manifolds include lines and circles, but not lemniscates. Two-dimensional manifolds are also called surfaces. Examples include the plane, the sphere, and the torus, and also the Klein bottle and real projective plane.
The concept of a manifold is central to many parts of geometry and modern mathematical physics because it allows complicated structures to be described in terms of well-understood topological properties of simpler spaces. Manifolds naturally arise as solution sets of systems of equations and as graphs of functions. The concept has applications in computer-graphics given the need to associate pictures with coordinates (e.g. CT scans).
Manifolds can be equipped with additional structure. One important class of manifolds are differentiable manifolds; their differentiable structure allows calculus to be done. A Riemannian metric on a manifold allows distances and angles to be measured. Symplectic manifolds serve as the phase spaces in the Hamiltonian formalism of classical mechanics, while four-dimensional Lorentzian manifolds model spacetime in general relativity.
The study of manifolds requires working knowledge of calculus and topology.
After a line, a circle is the simplest example of a topological manifold. Topology ignores bending, so a small piece of a circle is treated the same as a small piece of a line. Considering, for instance, the top part of the unit circle, x2 + y2 = 1, where the y-coordinate is positive (indicated by the yellow arc in Figure 1). Any point of this arc can be uniquely described by its x-coordinate. So, projection onto the first coordinate is a continuous and invertible mapping from the upper arc to the open interval (−1, 1):
Such functions along with the open regions they map are called charts.
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This course is an introduction to the theory of Riemann surfaces. Riemann surfaces naturally appear is mathematics in many different ways: as a result of analytic continuation, as quotients of complex
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Learn to optimize on smooth, nonlinear spaces: Join us to build your foundations (starting at "what is a manifold?") and confidently implement your first algorithm (Riemannian gradient descent).
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In algorithms for solving optimization problems constrained to a smooth manifold, retractions are a well-established tool to ensure that the iterates stay on the manifold. More recently, it has been demonstrated that retractions are a useful concept for ot ...
This thesis is a study of the global well-posedness of the Cauchy problems for half-wave maps from the Minkowski space of dimension n+1 to the 2-dimensional sphere and the hyperbolic plane. The work is mainly based on the results from Krieger-Sire 17' in ...
EPFL2023
We determine the bounded cohomology of the group of homeomorphisms of certain low-dimensional manifolds. In particular, for the group of orientation-preserving homeomorphisms of the circle and of the closed 2-disc, it is isomorphic to the polynomial ring g ...