Glossary of differential geometry and topology

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This is a glossary of terms specific to differential geometry and differential topology. The following two glossaries are closely related:

• Glossary of general topology
• Glossary of Riemannian and metric geometry.

See also:

• List of differential geometry topics

Words in italics denote a self-reference to this glossary.

Contents: A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

A

Atlas

B

Bundle, see fiber bundle.

C

Chart

Cobordism

Codimension. The codimension of a submanifold is the dimension of the ambient space minus the dimension of the submanifold.

Connected sum

Connection

Cotangent bundle, the vector bundle of cotangent spaces on a manifold.

Cotangent space

D

Diffeomorphism. Given two differentiable manifolds M and N, a bijective map <math>f<math> from M to N is called a diffeomorphism if both <math>f:M\to N<math> and its inverse <math>f^{-1}:N\to M<math> are smooth.

Doubling, given a manifold M with boundary, doubling is taking two copies of M and identifying their boundaries. As the result we get a manifold without boundary.

E

Embedding

F

Fiber. In a fiber bundle, π: E → B the preimage π⁻¹(x) of a point x in the base B is called the fiber over x, often denoted E_x.

Fiber bundle

Frame

Frame bundle, the principal bundle of frames on a smooth manifold.

Flow

G

Genus

H

Hypersurface. A hypersurface is a submanifold of codimension one.

I

Immersion

L

Lens space. A lens space is a quotient of the 3-sphere (or (2n+1)-sphere) by a free isometric action of Z_k.

M

Manifold. A topological manifold is a locally Eulidean Hausdorff space. (In BambooWeb, a manifold need not be paracompact or second-countable.) A C^k manifold is a differentiable manifold whose chart overlap functions are k times continuously differentiable. A C^∞ or smooth manifold is a differentiable manifold whose chart overlap functions are infinitely continuously differentiable.

P

Parallelizable. A smooth manifold is parallelizable if it admits a smooth global frame. This is equivalent to the tangent bundle being trivial.

Principal bundle. A principal bundle is a fiber bundle P → B together with right action on P by a Lie group G that preverses the fibers of P and acts simply transitively on those fibers.

Pullback

S

Section

Submanifold. A submanifold is the image of a smooth embedding of a manifold.

Submersion

Surface, a two-dimensional manifold or submanifold.

T

Tangent bundle, the vector bundle of tangent spaces on a differtiable manifold.

Tangent field, a section of the tangent bundle. Also called a vector field.

Tangent space

Torus

Transversality. Two submanifolds M and N intersect transversally if at each point of intersection p their tangent spaces <math>T_p(M)<math> and <math>T_p(N)<math> generate the whole tangent space at p of the total manifold.

Trivialization

V

Vector bundle, a fiber bundle whose fibers are vector spaces and whose transition functions are linear maps.

Vector field, a section of a vector bundle. More specifically, a vector field can mean a section of the tangent bundle.

W

Whitney sum. A Whitney sum is an analog of the direct product for vector bundles. Given two vector bundles α and β over the same base B their cartesian product is a vector bundle over B ×B. The diagonal map <math>B\to B\times B<math> induces a vector bundle over B called the Whitney sum of these vector bundles and denoted by α⊕β.