In mathematics, a diffeomorphism is an isomorphism of differentiable manifolds. It is an invertible function that maps one differentiable manifold to another such that both the function and its inverse are continuously differentiable.
In mathematics, genus has a few different, but closely related, meanings. Intuitively, the genus is the number of "holes" of a surface. A sphere has genus 0, while a torus has genus 1.
In mathematics, Thurston's geometrization conjecture states that each of certain three-dimensional topological spaces has a unique geometric structure that can be associated with it. It is an analogue of the uniformization theorem for two-dimensional surfaces, which states that every simply connected Riemann surface can be given one of three geometries . In three dimensions, it is not always possible to assign a single geometry to a whole topological space. Instead, the geometrization conjecture states that every closed 3-manifold can be decomposed in a canonical way into pieces that each have one of eight types of geometric structure. The conjecture was proposed by William Thurston, and implies several other conjectures, such as the Poincaré conjecture and Thurston's elliptization conjecture.
In mathematics, specifically in topology, the operation of connected sum is a geometric modification on manifolds. Its effect is to join two given manifolds together near a chosen point on each. This construction plays a key role in the classification of closed surfaces.
Algebraic K-theory is a subject area in mathematics with connections to geometry, topology, ring theory, and number theory. Geometric, algebraic, and arithmetic objects are assigned objects called K-groups. These are groups in the sense of abstract algebra. They contain detailed information about the original object but are notoriously difficult to compute; for example, an important outstanding problem is to compute the K-groups of the integers.
In differential geometry, the holonomy of a connection on a smooth manifold is a general geometrical consequence of the curvature of the connection measuring the extent to which parallel transport around closed loops fails to preserve the geometrical data being transported. For flat connections, the associated holonomy is a type of monodromy and is an inherently global notion. For curved connections, holonomy has nontrivial local and global features.
In the mathematical field of Riemannian geometry, the fundamental theorem of Riemannian geometry states that on any Riemannian manifold there is a unique affine connection that is torsion-free and metric-compatible, called the Levi-Civita connection or (pseudo-)Riemannian connection of the given metric. Because it is canonically defined by such properties, often this connection is automatically used when given a metric.
In the mathematical field of geometric topology, a Heegaard splitting is a decomposition of a compact oriented 3-manifold that results from dividing it into two handlebodies.
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.
In mathematics, an incompressible surface is a surface properly embedded in a 3-manifold, which, in intuitive terms, is a "nontrivial" surface that cannot be simplified. In non-mathematical terms, the surface of a suitcase is compressible, because we could cut the handle and shrink it into the surface. But a Conway sphere is incompressible, because there are essential parts of a knot or link both inside and out, so there is no way to move the entire knot or link to one side of the punctured sphere. The mathematical definition is as follows. There are two cases to consider. A sphere is incompressible if both inside and outside the sphere there are some obstructions that prevent the sphere from shrinking to a point and also prevent the sphere from expanding to encompass all of space. A surface other than a sphere is incompressible if any disk with its boundary on the surface spans a disk in the surface.
In mathematics, the soul theorem is a theorem of Riemannian geometry that largely reduces the study of complete manifolds of non-negative sectional curvature to that of the compact case. Jeff Cheeger and Detlef Gromoll proved the theorem in 1972 by generalizing a 1969 result of Gromoll and Wolfgang Meyer. The related soul conjecture, formulated by Cheeger and Gromoll at that time, was proved twenty years later by Grigori Perelman.
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, complex cobordism is a generalized cohomology theory related to cobordism of manifolds. Its spectrum is denoted by MU. It is an exceptionally powerful cohomology theory, but can be quite hard to compute, so often instead of using it directly one uses some slightly weaker theories derived from it, such as Brown–Peterson cohomology or Morava K-theory, that are easier to compute.
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.
Abstract analytic number theory is a branch of mathematics which takes the ideas and techniques of classical analytic number theory and applies them to a variety of different mathematical fields. The classical prime number theorem serves as a prototypical example, and the emphasis is on abstract asymptotic distribution results. The theory was invented and developed by mathematicians such as John Knopfmacher and Arne Beurling in the twentieth century.
In mathematics, a pair of pants is a surface which is homeomorphic to the three-holed sphere. The name comes from considering one of the removed disks as the waist and the two others as the cuffs of a pair of pants.
In mathematics, Dehn's lemma asserts that a piecewise-linear map of a disk into a 3-manifold, with the map's singularity set in the disk's interior, implies the existence of another piecewise-linear map of the disk which is an embedding and is identical to the original on the boundary of the disk.
In mathematics, Reidemeister torsion is a topological invariant of manifolds introduced by Kurt Reidemeister for 3-manifolds and generalized to higher dimensions by Wolfgang Franz and Georges de Rham . Analytic torsion is an invariant of Riemannian manifolds defined by Daniel B. Ray and Isadore M. Singer as an analytic analogue of Reidemeister torsion. Jeff Cheeger and Werner Müller proved Ray and Singer's conjecture that Reidemeister torsion and analytic torsion are the same for compact Riemannian manifolds.
In topology, a branch of mathematics, a prime manifold is an n-manifold that cannot be expressed as a non-trivial connected sum of two n-manifolds. Non-trivial means that neither of the two is an n-sphere. A similar notion is that of an irreduciblen-manifold, which is one in which any embedded (n − 1)-sphere bounds an embedded n-ball. Implicit in this definition is the use of a suitable category, such as the category of differentiable manifolds or the category of piecewise-linear manifolds.
Herbert Blaine Lawson, Jr. is a mathematician best known for his work in minimal surfaces, calibrated geometry, and algebraic cycles. He is currently a Distinguished Professor of Mathematics at Stony Brook University. He received his PhD from Stanford University in 1969 for work carried out under the supervision of Robert Osserman.
