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- See manifold (automotive
engineering) for an account of that topic.
In mathematics, a manifold is a topological space that looks locally like the "ordinary" Euclidean space Rn and is a Hausdorff space. An example is the surface of a sphere such as Earth, which
is not a plane, but small patches of it are homeomorphic to (i.e., topologically equivalent to) patches of the Euclidean plane.
To make precise the notion of "looks locally like" one uses local coordinate systems or charts. A connected
manifold has a definite topological dimension, which equals the number of coordinates needed in each local coordinate
system. What follows below is a clean, contemporary mathematical treatment of manifolds; the foundational aspects of the subject
were clarified during the 1930s, making precise intuitions dating back to the latter half of the 19th century, and developed
through differential geometry and Lie group theory.
If the local charts on a manifold are compatible in a certain sense, one can talk about directions, tangent spaces, and
differentiable functions on that manifold. These manifolds are called differentiable. In order to measure lengths and
angles, even more structure is needed: one defines Riemannian manifolds to recover these geometrical ideas.
Differentiable manifolds are used in mathematics to describe geometrical objects; they are also the most natural and general
setting to study differentiability. In physics, differentiable manifolds serve as the phase space in
classical mechanics and four dimensional pseudo-Riemannian manifolds are used to model spacetime in general
relativity.
Topological manifolds
A topological n-manifold with boundary is a Hausdorff space in which every point has an open neighbourhood homeomorphic to either an
open subset of E n (Euclidean n-space) or an open subset of the closed half of
E n. The set of points which have an open neighbourhood homeomorphic to
E n is called the interior of the manifold; it is always non-empty. The
complement of the interior, is called the boundary; it is an
(n-1)-manifold.
A manifold with empty boundary is said to be closed if it is compact, and open if it is not compact.
Manifolds inherit many of the local properties of Euclidean space. In particular, they are locally path-connected, locally compact and
locally metrizable. (Readers should see the Topology Glossary for definitions of topological terms used in this
article.) Being locally compact Hausdorff spaces they are necessarily Tychonoff spaces. Requiring a manifold to be Hausdorff may seem strange; it is tempting to think that being
locally homeomorphic to a Euclidean space implies being a Hausdorff space.
A counterexample is created by deleting zero from the real line and replacing it with two points, an open neighborhood
of either of which includes all nonzero numbers in some open interval centered at zero. This construction, called the real
line with two origins is not Hausdorff, because the two origins cannot be separated.
Every connected manifold without boundary is homogeneous.
It can be shown that a manifold is metrizable if and
only if it is paracompact. Non-paracompact manifolds (such as the long line) are generally regarded as pathological, so it's common to add paracompactness
to the definition of an n-manifold. Sometimes n-manifolds are defined to be second countable, which is precisely the condition required to ensure that
the manifold embeds in some finite-dimensional Euclidean space. Note that every compact manifold is second-countable, and every
second-countable manifold is paracompact.
Differentiable manifolds
It is easy to define topological manifold, but it is very hard to work with this object. The differatiable
structure defined below makes possible to apply "calculus" on manifold.
We start with a topological manifold M without boundary. An open set
of M together with a homeomorphism between the open set and an open set of En is
called a coordinate chart. A collection of charts which cover
M is called an atlas of M. The
homeomorphisms of two overlapping charts provide a transition map from a subset of En
to some other subset of En. If all these maps are k times continuously
differentiable, then the atlas is an Ck atlas.
Example: The unit sphere in R3 can be covered by
two charts: the complements of the north and south poles with coordinate maps - stereographic projections relative to the two poles.
Two Ck atlases are called equivalent if their union is a
Ck atlas. This is an equivalence relation, and a Ck manifold is defined
to be a manifold together with an equivalence class of Ck atlases. If all the
connecting maps are infinitely often differentiable, then one speaks of a smooth or
C∞ manifold; if they are all analytic, then the manifold is an analytic or Cω
manifold.
Intuitively, a smooth atlas provides local coordinate systems such that the change-of-coordinate functions are smooth. These
coordinate systems allow one to define differentiability and integrability of functions on M.
Associated with every point on a differentiable manifold is a tangent
space and its dual, the cotangent space. The former consists of the possible directional derivatives, and the latter of the
differentials, which can be thought of as infinitesimal elements of the
manifold. These spaces always have the same dimension n as the
manifold does. The collection of all tangent spaces can in turn be made into a manifold, the tangent bundle, whose dimension is 2n.
Once a C1 atlas on a paracompact manifold is given, we can refine it to a real analytic atlas (meaning
that the new atlas, considered as a C1 atlas, is equivalent to the given one), and all such refinements give
the same analytic manifold. Therefore, one often considers only these latter manifolds.
Not every topological manifold admits such a smooth atlas. The lowest dimension is 4 where there are non-smoothable
topological manifolds. Also, it is possible for two non-equivalent differentiable manifolds to be homeomorphic. The famous example was given by John
Milnor of wild 7-spheres, i.e. non-diffeomorphic topological 7-spheres.
Classification of manifolds
It is known that every second-countable connected 1-manifold without boundary is homeomorphic either to R or the
circle. (The unconnected ones are just disjoint unions of these.)
For a classification of 2-manifolds, see Surface.
The 3-dimensional case may be solved. Thurston's Geometrization Conjecture, if true, together with current knowledge, would
imply a classification of 3-manifolds. Grigori Perelman may have
proven this conjecture; his work is currently being evaluated, as of June 14, 2003.
The classification of n-manifolds for n greater than three is known to be impossible; it is equivalent to
the so-called word problem in group theory, which has
been shown to be undecidable. In other words, there is no algorithm for
deciding whether given manifold is simply connected, however there is a classification of simply connected manifolds of dimension ≥ 5.
Additional structures and generalizations
In order to do geometry on manifolds it is usually necessary to adorn these
spaces with additional structures, such as the differential structure discussed above. There are numerous other possibilites,
depending on the kind of geometry one is interested in:
- A Riemannian manifold is a differentiable manifold on
which the tangent spaces are equipped with inner products in
a differentiable fashion. The inner product structure is given in the form of a symmetric 2-tensor called the Riemannian metric. On a Riemannian manifold one has notions of length,
volume, and angle.
- A complex manifold is a manifold modeled on
Cn with holomorphic transition functions
on chart overlaps. These manifolds are the basic objects of
study in complex geometry.
- A Kähler manifold is a manifold which simultaneously carries a
Riemannian structure, a symplectic structure, and a complex structure which are all compatible in some suitable sense.
- A Lie group is C∞ manifold which also carries a
smooth group
structure. These are the proper objects for describing symmetries of analytical structures.
Manifolds "locally look like" Euclidean space
Rn and are therefore inherently finite-dimensional objects. To allow for infinite
dimensions, one may consider Banach manifolds which locally look like Banach spaces, or Fréchet manifolds, which locally look like Fréchet spaces.
An orbifold is yet an another generalization of manifold, one that allows
certain kinds of "singularities" in the topology.
Roughly speaking, it is a space which locally looks like the quotient of Euclidean space by a finite group. The singularities
correspond to fixed points of the group action.
The category of smooth manifolds with smooth maps lacks certain
desirable properties, and people have tried to generalize smooth manifolds in order to rectify this. The diffeological spaces use a different notion of chart known as
"plots". Differential spaces and Frölicher spaces are other
attempts.
References
- Kirby, Robion C.; Siebenmann, Laurence C. Foundational Essays on Topological Manifolds. Smoothings, and
Triangulations. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press (1977). ISBN 0-691-08190-5. A detailed study of the
category of topological manifolds (with continuous maps as morphisms).
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