Concept
Handle decomposition
Related concepts (6)
Surgery theory
In mathematics, specifically in geometric topology, surgery theory is a collection of techniques used to produce one finite-dimensional manifold from another in a 'controlled' way, introduced by . Milnor called this technique surgery, while Andrew Wallace called it spherical modification. The "surgery" on a differentiable manifold M of dimension , could be described as removing an imbedded sphere of dimension p from M. Originally developed for differentiable (or, smooth) manifolds, surgery techniques also apply to piecewise linear (PL-) and topological manifolds.
Handlebody
In the mathematical field of geometric topology, a handlebody is a decomposition of a manifold into standard pieces. Handlebodies play an important role in Morse theory, cobordism theory and the surgery theory of high-dimensional manifolds. Handles are used to particularly study 3-manifolds. Handlebodies play a similar role in the study of manifolds as simplicial complexes and CW complexes play in homotopy theory, allowing one to analyze a space in terms of individual pieces and their interactions.
H-cobordism
In geometric topology and differential topology, an (n + 1)-dimensional cobordism W between n-dimensional manifolds M and N is an h-cobordism (the h stands for homotopy equivalence) if the inclusion maps are homotopy equivalences. The h-cobordism theorem gives sufficient conditions for an h-cobordism to be trivial, i.e., to be C-isomorphic to the cylinder M × [0, 1]. Here C refers to any of the categories of smooth, piecewise linear, or topological manifolds.
Manifold
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.
Geometric topology
In mathematics, geometric topology is the study of manifolds and maps between them, particularly embeddings of one manifold into another. Geometric topology as an area distinct from algebraic topology may be said to have originated in the 1935 classification of lens spaces by Reidemeister torsion, which required distinguishing spaces that are homotopy equivalent but not homeomorphic. This was the origin of simple homotopy theory. The use of the term geometric topology to describe these seems to have originated rather recently.
Cobordism
In mathematics, cobordism is a fundamental equivalence relation on the class of compact manifolds of the same dimension, set up using the concept of the boundary (French bord, giving cobordism) of a manifold. Two manifolds of the same dimension are cobordant if their disjoint union is the boundary of a compact manifold one dimension higher. The boundary of an (n + 1)-dimensional manifold W is an n-dimensional manifold ∂W that is closed, i.e., with empty boundary.