He motivated the idea of a manifold by an intuitive process of varying a given object in a new direction, and presciently described the role of coordinate systems and charts in subsequent formal developments: Riemann first described manifolds in his famous habilitation lecture before the faculty at Göttingen. The emergence of differential geometry as a distinct discipline is generally credited to Carl Friedrich Gauss and Bernhard Riemann. Main article: History of manifolds and varieties
3.3 Differentiability of mappings between manifolds.3.1.3 Definition of tangent space and differentiation in local coordinates.3.1.2 Tangent vector and the differential.2.3 Patching together Euclidean pieces to form a manifold."Differentiability" of a manifold has been given several meanings, including: continuously differentiable, k-times differentiable, smooth (which itself has many meanings), and analytic. The study of calculus on differentiable manifolds is known as differential geometry. This leads to such mathematical machinery as the exterior calculus. It is possible to develop a calculus for differentiable manifolds. Special kinds of differentiable manifolds form the basis for physical theories such as classical mechanics, general relativity, and Yang–Mills theory. A locally differential structure allows one to define the globally differentiable tangent space, differentiable functions, and differentiable tensor and vector fields.ĭifferentiable manifolds are very important in physics. The ability to define such a local differential structure on an abstract space allows one to extend the definition of differentiability to spaces without global coordinate systems. The maps that relate the coordinates defined by the various charts to one another are called transition maps. In other words, where the domains of charts overlap, the coordinates defined by each chart are required to be differentiable with respect to the coordinates defined by every chart in the atlas. To induce a global differential structure on the local coordinate systems induced by the homeomorphisms, their compositions on chart intersections in the atlas must be differentiable functions on the corresponding vector space.
Any topological manifold can be given a differential structure locally by using the homeomorphisms in its atlas and the standard differential structure on a vector space. In formal terms, a differentiable manifold is a topological manifold with a globally defined differential structure. If the charts are suitably compatible (namely, the transition from one chart to another is differentiable), then computations done in one chart are valid in any other differentiable chart. One may then apply ideas from calculus while working within the individual charts, since each chart lies within a vector space to which the usual rules of calculus apply. Any manifold can be described by a collection of charts ( atlas). In mathematics, a differentiable manifold (also differential manifold) is a type of manifold that is locally similar enough to a vector space to allow one to apply calculus. The notion of a differentiable manifold refines that of a manifold by requiring the functions that transform between charts to be differentiable. In the center and right charts, the Tropic of Cancer is a smooth curve, whereas in the left chart it has a sharp corner. The results of calculus may not be compatible between charts if the atlas is not differentiable. A nondifferentiable atlas of charts for the globe.