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A topological manifold with boundary is a Hausdorff space in which every point has a neighborhood homeomorphic to an open subset of Euclidean half-space (for a fixed n):
By definition, all manifolds are topological manifolds, so the phrase "topological manifold" is usually used to emphasize that a manifold lacks additional structure, or that only its topological properties are being considered. Formally, a topological manifold is a topological space locally homeomorphic to a Euclidean space.
Conversely, the boundary of a closed disk viewed as a manifold is the bounding circle, as is its topological boundary viewed as a subset of the real plane, while its topological boundary viewed as a subset of itself is empty. In particular, the topological boundary depends on the ambient space, while the boundary of a manifold is invariant.
An open surface with x-, y-, and z-contours shown.. In the part of mathematics referred to as topology, a surface is a two-dimensional manifold.Some surfaces arise as the boundaries of three-dimensional solid figures; for example, the sphere is the boundary of the solid ball.
A Seifert surface of a knot is however a manifold with boundary, the boundary being the knot, i.e. homeomorphic to the unit circle. The genus of such a surface is defined to be the genus of the two-manifold, which is obtained by gluing the unit disk along the boundary.
The manifold can be constructed by first plumbing together disc bundles of Euler number 2 over the sphere, according to the Dynkin diagram for . This results in P E 8 {\displaystyle P_{E_{8}}} , a 4-manifold whose boundary is homeomorphic to the Poincaré homology sphere .
This is not the same as the dimension of the manifold. For instance, a 4-dimensional 2-handlebody is a union of 0-handles, 1-handles and 2-handles. Any manifold is an n-handlebody, that is, any manifold is the union of handles. It isn't too hard to see that a manifold is an (n-1)-handlebody if and only if it has non-empty boundary.
A topological manifold that is in the image of is said to "admit a differentiable structure", and the fiber over a given topological manifold is "the different differentiable structures on the given topological manifold". Thus given two categories, the two natural questions are: