Gis Manifold
Francesca Cruiz
In mathematics, a manifold is a topological space that locally resembles Euclidean space near each point. More precisely, an n \displaystyle n -dimensional manifold, or n \displaystyle n -manifold for short, is a topological space with the property that each point has a neighborhood that is homeomorphic to an open subset of n \displaystyle n -dimensional Euclidean space.
One-dimensional manifolds include lines and circles, but not self-crossing curves such as a figure 8. 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.
This example is historically significant, as it has motivated the terminology; it became apparent that the whole surface of the Earth cannot have a plane representation consisting of a single map (also called "chart", see nautical chart), and therefore one needs atlases for covering the whole Earth surface.
However, excluded are examples like two touching circles that share a point to form a figure-8; at the shared point, a satisfactory chart cannot be created. Even with the bending allowed by topology, the vicinity of the shared point looks like a "+", not a line. A "+" is not homeomorphic to a line segment, since deleting the center point from the "+" gives a space with four components (i.e. pieces), whereas deleting a point from a line segment gives a space with at most two pieces; topological operations always preserve the number of pieces.
There are many different kinds of manifolds. In geometry and topology, all manifolds are topological manifolds, possibly with additional structure. A manifold can be constructed by giving a collection of coordinate charts, that is, a covering by open sets with homeomorphisms to a Euclidean space, and patching functions[clarification needed]: homeomorphisms from one region of Euclidean space to another region if they correspond to the same part of the manifold in two different coordinate charts. A manifold can be given additional structure if the patching functions satisfy axioms beyond continuity. For instance, differentiable manifolds have homeomorphisms on overlapping neighborhoods diffeomorphic with each other, so that the manifold has a well-defined set of functions which are differentiable in each neighborhood, thus differentiable on the manifold as a whole.
Locally homeomorphic to a Euclidean space means that every point has a neighborhood homeomorphic to an open subset of the Euclidean space R n , \displaystyle \mathbb R ^n, for some nonnegative integer n.
Sheaf-theoretically, a manifold is a locally ringed space, whose structure sheaf is locally isomorphic to the sheaf of continuous (or differentiable, or complex-analytic, etc.) functions on Euclidean space. This definition is mostly used when discussing analytic manifolds in algebraic geometry.
The spherical Earth is navigated using flat maps or charts, collected in an atlas. Similarly, a manifold can be described using mathematical maps, called coordinate charts, collected in a mathematical atlas. It is not generally possible to describe a manifold with just one chart, because the global structure of the manifold is different from the simple structure of the charts. For example, no single flat map can represent the entire Earth without separation of adjacent features across the map's boundaries or duplication of coverage. When a manifold is constructed from multiple overlapping charts, the regions where they overlap carry information essential to understanding the global structure.
A coordinate map, a coordinate chart, or simply a chart, of a manifold is an invertible map between a subset of the manifold and a simple space such that both the map and its inverse preserve the desired structure.[2] For a topological manifold, the simple space is a subset of some Euclidean space R n \displaystyle \mathbb R ^n and interest focuses on the topological structure. This structure is preserved by homeomorphisms, invertible maps that are continuous in both directions.
In the case of a differentiable manifold, a set of charts called an atlas, whose transition functions (see below) are all differentiable, allows us to do calculus on it. Polar coordinates, for example, form a chart for the plane R 2 \displaystyle \mathbb R ^2 minus the positive x-axis and the origin. Another example of a chart is the map χtop mentioned above, a chart for the circle.
The description of most manifolds requires more than one chart. A specific collection of charts which covers a manifold is called an atlas. An atlas is not unique as all manifolds can be covered in multiple ways using different combinations of charts. Two atlases are said to be equivalent if their union is also an atlas.
The atlas containing all possible charts consistent with a given atlas is called the maximal atlas (i.e. an equivalence class containing that given atlas). Unlike an ordinary atlas, the maximal atlas of a given manifold is unique. Though useful for definitions, it is an abstract object and not used directly (e.g. in calculations).
Charts in an atlas may overlap and a single point of a manifold may be represented in several charts. If two charts overlap, parts of them represent the same region of the manifold, just as a map of Europe and a map of Russia may both contain Moscow. Given two overlapping charts, a transition function can be defined which goes from an open ball in R n \displaystyle \mathbb R ^n to the manifold and then back to another (or perhaps the same) open ball in R n \displaystyle \mathbb R ^n . The resultant map, like the map T in the circle example above, is called a change of coordinates, a coordinate transformation, a transition function, or a transition map.
An atlas can also be used to define additional structure on the manifold. The structure is first defined on each chart separately. If all transition maps are compatible with this structure, the structure transfers to the manifold.
This is the standard way differentiable manifolds are defined. If the transition functions of an atlas for a topological manifold preserve the natural differential structure of R n \displaystyle \mathbb R ^n (that is, if they are diffeomorphisms), the differential structure transfers to the manifold and turns it into a differentiable manifold. Complex manifolds are introduced in an analogous way by requiring that the transition functions of an atlas are holomorphic functions. For symplectic manifolds, the transition functions must be symplectomorphisms.
Perhaps the simplest way to construct a manifold is the one used in the example above of the circle. First, a subset of R 2 \displaystyle \mathbb R ^2 is identified, and then an atlas covering this subset is constructed. The concept of manifold grew historically from constructions like this. Here is another example, applying this method to the construction of a sphere:
A manifold can be constructed by gluing together pieces in a consistent manner, making them into overlapping charts. This construction is possible for any manifold and hence it is often used as a characterisation, especially for differentiable and Riemannian manifolds. It focuses on an atlas, as the patches naturally provide charts, and since there is no exterior space involved it leads to an intrinsic view of the manifold.
The manifold is constructed by specifying an atlas, which is itself defined by transition maps. A point of the manifold is therefore an equivalence class of points which are mapped to each other by transition maps. Charts map equivalence classes to points of a single patch. There are usually strong demands on the consistency of the transition maps. For topological manifolds they are required to be homeomorphisms; if they are also diffeomorphisms, the resulting manifold is a differentiable manifold.
The first construction and this construction are very similar, but represent rather different points of view. In the first construction, the manifold is seen as embedded in some Euclidean space. This is the extrinsic view. When a manifold is viewed in this way, it is easy to use intuition from Euclidean spaces to define additional structure. For example, in a Euclidean space, it is always clear whether a vector at some point is tangential or normal to some surface through that point.
The patchwork construction does not use any embedding, but simply views the manifold as a topological space by itself. This abstract point of view is called the intrinsic view. It can make it harder to imagine what a tangent vector might be, and there is no intrinsic notion of a normal bundle, but instead there is an intrinsic stable normal bundle.
This function is its own inverse and thus can be used in both directions. As the transition map is a smooth function, this atlas defines a smooth manifold.In the case n = 1, the example simplifies to the circle example given earlier.
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