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
Calcul différentiel et intégral.
Eléments d'analyse complexe.
In real analysis, the projectively extended real line (also called the one-point compactification of the real line), is the extension of the set of the real numbers, , by a point denoted ∞. It is thus the set with the standard arithmetic operations extended where possible, and is sometimes denoted by or The added point is called the point at infinity, because it is considered as a neighbour of both ends of the real line. More precisely, the point at infinity is the limit of every sequence of real numbers whose absolute values are increasing and unbounded.
In an area of mathematics called differential topology, an exotic sphere is a differentiable manifold M that is homeomorphic but not diffeomorphic to the standard Euclidean n-sphere. That is, M is a sphere from the point of view of all its topological properties, but carrying a smooth structure that is not the familiar one (hence the name "exotic"). The first exotic spheres were constructed by in dimension as -bundles over . He showed that there are at least 7 differentiable structures on the 7-sphere.
In mathematics, a 4-manifold is a 4-dimensional topological manifold. A smooth 4-manifold is a 4-manifold with a smooth structure. In dimension four, in marked contrast with lower dimensions, topological and smooth manifolds are quite different. There exist some topological 4-manifolds which admit no smooth structure, and even if there exists a smooth structure, it need not be unique (i.e. there are smooth 4-manifolds which are homeomorphic but not diffeomorphic).
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).
Algebraic topology is a branch of mathematics that uses tools from abstract algebra to study topological spaces. The basic goal is to find algebraic invariants that classify topological spaces up to homeomorphism, though usually most classify up to homotopy equivalence. Although algebraic topology primarily uses algebra to study topological problems, using topology to solve algebraic problems is sometimes also possible. Algebraic topology, for example, allows for a convenient proof that any subgroup of a free group is again a free group.
Differential geometry is a mathematical discipline that studies the geometry of smooth shapes and smooth spaces, otherwise known as smooth manifolds. It uses the techniques of differential calculus, integral calculus, linear algebra and multilinear algebra. The field has its origins in the study of spherical geometry as far back as antiquity. It also relates to astronomy, the geodesy of the Earth, and later the study of hyperbolic geometry by Lobachevsky.
Euclidean geometry is a mathematical system attributed to ancient Greek mathematician Euclid, which he described in his textbook on geometry, Elements. Euclid's approach consists in assuming a small set of intuitively appealing axioms (postulates) and deducing many other propositions (theorems) from these. Although many of Euclid's results had been stated earlier, Euclid was the first to organize these propositions into a logical system in which each result is proved from axioms and previously proved theorems.
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 ...