The study of manifolds combines many important areas of mathematics: it generalizes concepts such as curves and surfaces as well as ideas from linear algebra and topology. Certain special classes of manifolds also have additional algebraic structure; they may behave like groups, for instance. In that case, they are called Lie Groups. Alternatively, they may be described by polynomial equations, in which case they are called algebraic varieties, and if they additionally carry a group structure, they are called algebraic groups.
The term "manifold" comes from German Mannigfaltigkeit, by Bernhard Riemann.
In English, "manifold" refers to spaces with a differentiable or topological structure, while "variety" refers to spaces with an algebraic structure, as in algebraic varieties.
In Romance languages, manifold is translated as "variety" – such spaces with a differentiable structure are literally translated as "analytic varieties", while spaces with an algebraic structure are called "algebraic varieties". Thus for example, the French word "variété topologique" means topological manifold. In the same vein, the Japanese word "多様体" (tayōtai) also encompasses both manifold and variety. ("多様" (tayō) means various.)
Background
Ancestral to the modern concept of a manifold were several important results of 18th and 19th century mathematics. The oldest of these was Non-Euclidean geometry, which considers spaces where Euclid's parallel postulate fails. Saccheri first studied this geometry in 1733. Lobachevsky, Bolyai, and Riemann developed the subject further 100 years later. Their research uncovered two types of spaces whose geometric structures differ from that of classical Euclidean space; these are called hyperbolic geometry and elliptic geometry. In the modern theory of manifolds, these notions correspond to manifolds with constant, negative and positive curvature, respectively.
Carl Friedrich Gauss may have been the first to consider abstract spaces as mathematical objects in their own right. His theorema egregium gives a method for computing the curvature of a surface without considering the ambient space in which the surface lies. In modern terms, the theorem proved that the curvature of the surface is an intrinsic property. Manifold theory has come to focus exclusively on these intrinsic properties (or invariants), while largely ignoring the extrinsic properties of the ambient space.
Another, more topological example of an intrinsic property of a manifold is the Euler characteristic. For a non-intersecting graph in the Euclidean plane, with V vertices (or corners), E edges and F faces (counting the exterior) Euler showed that V-E+F= 2. Thus 2 is called the Euler characteristic of the plane. By contrast, in 1813 Antoine-Jean Lhuilier showed that the Euler characteristic of the torus is 0, since the complete graph on seven points can be embedded into the torus. The Euler characteristic of other surfaces is a useful topological invariant, which has been extended to higher dimensions using Betti numbers. In the mid nineteenth century, the Gauss–Bonnet theorem linked the Euler characteristic to the Gaussian curvature.
Lagrangian mechanics and Hamiltonian mechanics, when considered geometrically, are naturally manifold theories. All these use the notion of several characteristic axes or dimensions (known as generalized coordinates in the latter two cases), but these dimensions do not lie along the physical dimensions of width, height, and breadth.
In the early 19th century the theory of elliptic functions succeeded in giving a basis for the theory of elliptic integrals, and this left open an obvious avenue of research. The standard forms for elliptic integrals involved the square roots of cubic and quartic polynomials. When those were replaced by polynomials of higher degree, say quintics, what would happen?
Bernhard Riemann was the first to do extensive work generalizing the idea of a surface to higher dimensions. The name manifold comes from Riemann's original German term, Mannigfaltigkeit, which William Kingdon Clifford translated as "manifoldness". In his Göttingen inaugural lecture, Riemann described the set of all possible values of a variable with certain constraints as a Mannigfaltigkeit, because the variable can have many values. He distinguishes between stetige Mannigfaltigkeit and diskreteMannigfaltigkeit (continuous manifoldness and discontinuous manifoldness), depending on whether the value changes continuously or not. As continuous examples, Riemann refers to not only colors and the locations of objects in space, but also the possible shapes of a spatial figure. Using induction, Riemann constructs an n-fach ausgedehnte Mannigfaltigkeit (n times extended manifoldness or n-dimensional manifoldness) as a continuous stack of (n−1) dimensional manifoldnesses. Riemann's intuitive notion of a Mannigfaltigkeit evolved into what is today formalized as a manifold. Riemannian manifolds and Riemann surfaces are named after Bernhard Riemann.
In 1857, Riemann introduced the concept of Riemann surfaces as part of a study of the process of analytic continuation; Riemann surfaces are now recognized as one-dimensional complex manifolds. He also furthered the study of abelian and other multi-variable complex functions.
After Abel, Jacobi, and Riemann, some of the most important contributors to the theory of abelian functions were Weierstrass, Frobenius, Poincaré and Picard. The subject was very popular at the time, already having a large literature. By the end of the 19th century, mathematicians had begun to use geometric methods in the study of abelian functions.
Hermann Weyl gave an intrinsic definition for differentiable manifolds in 1912. During the 1930s Hassler Whitney and others clarified the foundational aspects of the subject, and thus intuitions dating back to the latter half of the 19th century became precise, and developed through differential geometry and Lie group theory.
The Whitney embedding theorem showed that manifolds intrinsically defined by charts could always be embedded in Euclidean space, as in the extrinsic definition, showing that the two concepts of manifold were equivalent. Due to this unification, it is said to be the first complete exposition of the modern concept of manifold.
Eventually, in the 1920s, Lefschetz laid the basis for the study of abelian functions in terms of complex tori. He also appears to have been the first to use the name "abelian variety"; in Romance languages, "variety" was used to translate Riemann's term "Mannigfaltigkeit". It was Weil in the 1940s who gave this subject its modern foundations in the language of algebraic geometry.
Henri Poincaré, Sur certaines surfaces algébriques; troisième complément à l'Analysis Situs, Bulletin de la Société mathématique de France, 30 (1902), pages 49–70.
Henri Poincaré, Sur les cycles des surfaces algébriques; quatrième complément à l'Analysis Situs, Journal de mathématiques pures et appliquées, 5° série, 8 (1902), pages 169–214.
Henri Poincaré, Cinquième complément à l'analysis situs, Rendiconti del Circolo matematico di Palermo 18 (1904) pages 45–110.
Erhard Scholz, Geschichte des Mannigfaltigkeitsbegriffs von Riemann bis Poincaré, Birkhäuser, 1980.
A study of the genesis of the manifold concept. Based on the author's dissertation, directed by Egbert Brieskorn.
In physics and mathematics, the dimension of a mathematical space is informally defined as the minimum number of coordinates needed to specify any point within it. Thus, a line has a dimension of one (1D) because only one coordinate is needed to specify a point on it – for example, the point at 5 on a number line. A surface, such as the boundary of a cylinder or sphere, has a dimension of two (2D) because two coordinates are needed to specify a point on it – for example, both a latitude and longitude are required to locate a point on the surface of a sphere. A two-dimensional Euclidean space is a two-dimensional space on the plane. The inside of a cube, a cylinder or a sphere is three-dimensional (3D) because three coordinates are needed to locate a point within these spaces.
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. The simplest examples of smooth spaces are the plane and space curves and surfaces in the three-dimensional Euclidean space, and the study of these shapes formed the basis for development of modern differential geometry during the 18th and 19th centuries.
In the part of mathematics referred to as topology, a surface is a two-dimensional manifold. Some surfaces arise as the boundaries of three-dimensional solid figures; for example, the sphere is the boundary of the solid ball. Other surfaces arise as graphs of functions of two variables; see the figure at right. However, surfaces can also be defined abstractly, without reference to any ambient space. For example, the Klein bottle is a surface that cannot be embedded in three-dimensional Euclidean space.
In mathematics, topology is concerned with the properties of a geometric object that are preserved under continuous deformations, such as stretching, twisting, crumpling, and bending; that is, without closing holes, opening holes, tearing, gluing, or passing through itself.
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.
Georg Friedrich Bernhard Riemann was a German mathematician who made profound contributions to analysis, number theory, and differential geometry. In the field of real analysis, he is mostly known for the first rigorous formulation of the integral, the Riemann integral, and his work on Fourier series. His contributions to complex analysis include most notably the introduction of Riemann surfaces, breaking new ground in a natural, geometric treatment of complex analysis. His 1859 paper on the prime-counting function, containing the original statement of the Riemann hypothesis, is regarded as a foundational paper of analytic number theory. Through his pioneering contributions to differential geometry, Riemann laid the foundations of the mathematics of general relativity. He is considered by many to be one of the greatest mathematicians of all time.
In mathematics, and more specifically in algebraic topology and polyhedral combinatorics, the Euler characteristic is a topological invariant, a number that describes a topological space's shape or structure regardless of the way it is bent. It is commonly denoted by .
In mathematics, particularly in complex analysis, a Riemann surface is a one-dimensional complex manifold.
Riemannian geometry is the branch of differential geometry that studies Riemannian manifolds, defined as smooth manifolds with a Riemannian metric. This gives, in particular, local notions of angle, length of curves, surface area and volume. From those, some other global quantities can be derived by integrating local contributions.
In mathematics, the uniformization theorem states that every simply connected Riemann surface is conformally equivalent to one of three Riemann surfaces: the open unit disk, the complex plane, or the Riemann sphere. The theorem is a generalization of the Riemann mapping theorem from simply connected open subsets of the plane to arbitrary simply connected Riemann surfaces.
In mathematics, the Chern theorem states that the Euler–Poincaré characteristic of a closed even-dimensional Riemannian manifold is equal to the integral of a certain polynomial of its curvature form.
In mathematics, geometric topology is the study of manifolds and maps between them, particularly embeddings of one manifold into another.
In mathematics, low-dimensional topology is the branch of topology that studies manifolds, or more generally topological spaces, of four or fewer dimensions. Representative topics are the structure theory of 3-manifolds and 4-manifolds, knot theory, and braid groups. This can be regarded as a part of geometric topology. It may also be used to refer to the study of topological spaces of dimension 1, though this is more typically considered part of continuum theory.
In mathematics, a 3-manifold is a topological space that locally looks like a three-dimensional Euclidean space. A 3-manifold can be thought of as a possible shape of the universe. Just as a sphere looks like a plane to a small and close enough observer, all 3-manifolds look like our universe does to a small enough observer. This is made more precise in the definition below.
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.
"Analysis Situs" is a seminal mathematics paper that Henri Poincaré published in 1895. Poincaré published five supplements to the paper between 1899 and 1904.
In mathematics, specifically geometry and topology, the classification of manifolds is a basic question, about which much is known, and many open questions remain.
In mathematics, a plane is a two-dimensional space or flat surface that extends indefinitely. A plane is the two-dimensional analogue of a point, a line and three-dimensional space.
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