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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 (a tangent plane) to a small and close enough observer, all 3-manifolds look like our universe does to a small enough observer ...
Familiar examples of two-dimensional manifolds include the sphere, torus, and Klein bottle; this book concentrates on three-dimensional manifolds, and on two-dimensional surfaces within them. A particular focus is a Heegaard splitting, a two-dimensional surface that partitions a 3-manifold into two handlebodies. It aims to present the main ...
For two dimensional manifolds a key invariant property is the genus, or "number of handles" present in a surface. A torus is a sphere with one handle, a double torus is a sphere with two handles, and so on. Indeed, it is possible to fully characterize compact, two-dimensional manifolds on the basis of genus and orientability.
There is a unique connected 0-dimensional manifold, namely the point, and disconnected 0-dimensional manifolds are just discrete sets, classified by cardinality. They have no geometry, and their study is combinatorics. A connected compact 1-dimensional manifold without boundary is homeomorphic (or diffeomorphic if it is smooth) to the circle.
The geometry and topology of three-manifolds is a set of widely circulated notes for a graduate course taught at Princeton University by William Thurston from 1978 to 1980 describing his work on 3-manifolds. They were written by Thurston, assisted by students William Floyd and Steven Kerchoff. [1]
American mathematician William Thurston. Thurston's 24 questions are a set of mathematical problems in differential geometry posed by American mathematician William Thurston in his influential 1982 paper Three-dimensional manifolds, Kleinian groups and hyperbolic geometry published in the Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society. [1]
A prism manifold is a closed 3-dimensional manifold M whose fundamental group is a central extension of a dihedral group. The fundamental group π 1 (M) of M is a product of a cyclic group of order m with a group having presentation , =, =
After the proof of the Geometrisation conjecture, understanding the topological properties of hyperbolic 3-manifolds is thus a major goal of 3-dimensional topology. Recent breakthroughs of Kahn–Markovic, Wise, Agol and others have answered most long-standing open questions on the topic but there are still many less prominent ones which have ...