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Let : be a smooth map of smooth manifolds. Given , the differential of at is a linear map : from the tangent space of at to the tangent space of at (). The image of a tangent vector under is sometimes called the pushforward of by .
Introduction to smooth manifolds. New York: Springer. ISBN 0-387-95448-1. A textbook on manifold theory. See also the same author's textbooks on topological manifolds (a lower level of structure) and Riemannian geometry (a higher level of structure).
Let be a smooth manifold; a (smooth) distribution assigns to any point a vector subspace in a smooth way. More precisely, consists of a collection {} of vector subspaces with the following property: Around any there exist a neighbourhood and a collection of vector fields, …, such that, for any point , span {(), …, ()} =.
Important to applications in mathematics and physics [1] is the notion of a flow on a manifold. In particular, if M {\displaystyle M} is a smooth manifold and X {\displaystyle X} is a smooth vector field , one is interested in finding integral curves to X {\displaystyle X} .
Let V be a smooth vector field on a smooth manifold M. There is a unique maximal flow D → M whose infinitesimal generator is V. Here D ⊆ R × M is the flow domain. For each p ∈ M the map D p → M is the unique maximal integral curve of V starting at p. A global flow is one whose flow domain is all of R × M. Global flows define smooth ...
Recall that a topological manifold is a topological space which is locally homeomorphic to . Differentiable manifolds generalize the notion of smoothness on in the following sense: a differentiable manifold is a topological manifold with a differentiable atlas, i.e. a collection of maps from open subsets of to the manifold which are used to "pull back" the differential structure from to the ...
The cotangent bundle T*N of any n-dimensional manifold N is itself a manifold (of dimension 2n) and supports naturally an exact symplectic structure ω = dλ. (This 1-form λ is sometimes called the Liouville form). There are several ways to construct an associated contact manifold, some of dimension 2n − 1, some of dimension 2n + 1.
This atlas contains every chart that is compatible with the smooth structure. There is a natural one-to-one correspondence between smooth structures and maximal smooth atlases. Thus, we may regard a smooth structure as a maximal smooth atlas and vice versa. In general, computations with the maximal atlas of a manifold are rather unwieldy.