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Important to applications in mathematics and physics [1] is the notion of a flow on a manifold. In particular, if is a smooth manifold and is a smooth vector field, one is interested in finding integral curves to .
In mathematics, a 5-manifold is a 5-dimensional topological manifold, possibly with a piecewise linear or smooth structure. Non- simply connected 5-manifolds are impossible to classify, as this is harder than solving the word problem for groups . [ 1 ]
There are three main types of structures important on manifolds. The foundational geometric structures are piecewise linear, mostly studied in geometric topology, and smooth manifold structures on a given topological manifold, which are the concern of differential topology as far as classification goes. Building on a smooth structure, there are:
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.
Riemannian geometry is the branch of differential geometry that studies Riemannian manifolds, defined as smooth manifolds with a Riemannian metric (an inner product on the tangent space at each point that varies smoothly from point to point). This gives, in particular, local notions of angle, length of curves, surface area and volume.
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 {(), …, ()} =.
Recall that a topological manifold is a topological space which is locally homeomorphic to . Differentiable manifolds (also called smooth 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 ...
Symplectic manifolds arise from classical mechanics; in particular, they are a generalization of the phase space of a closed system. [1] In the same way the Hamilton equations allow one to derive the time evolution of a system from a set of differential equations, the symplectic form should allow one to obtain a vector field describing the flow of the system from the differential of a ...