Manifold

An -dimensional manifold, or -manifold for short, is a Hausdorff and paracompact topological space with the property that each point has a neighbourhood that is homeomorphic to an open subset of -dimensional Euclidean space .

Clearly, on a manifold, there might be different collections of homeomorphisms that makes it locally Euclidean. So we introduce:

Chart and Atlas

A chart for a manifold is a homeomorphism where is open in and is open in . A collection of charts is called an atlas for if .

Compatible Chart

Two charts and are compatible if is a diffeomorphism

e.g.

  • Consider the set with the usual topology. and are both differentiable atlases. They are not compatible since the union is not differentiable.
  • The sphere is a closed subset of Euclidean space, thus the topological requirements are satisfied. Define the following two maps: as follows: We write as where and , we take and . Then we have

Differentiable (Smooth) Atlas

Let be an -dimensional manifold. An atlas for is differentiable or smooth if for every and in , the map is smooth, thus a diffeomorphism, as a map between open subsets of .

Compatible Atlases

Two differentiable atlases and are compatible if their union is also a differentiable atlas.

Proposition

Two differentiable atlases and are compatible if and only if for every chart in and in , both and are smooth.

Smooth Manifold

A structure on a manifold is an equivalence class of differentiable atlases, where two atlases are deemed equivalent if they are compatible. A smooth manifold is a manifold together with a smooth () structure on .

Remark

A given topological space can carry many different differentiable structures: For example, if we can take two charts and . Then both and are smooth atlases for , but they define different smooth structures.

e.g. is a smooth manifold.

Theorem

for all has a unique smooth structure. has uncountably many smooth structures.

Submanifolds

Submanifold of

A subset is a -dimensional submanifold of , if for every there exists an open set containing and a diffeomorphism such that , with . We call such a map a submanifold chart for at .

e.g.

Proposition

Any -dimensional submanifold of is a smooth manifold.

There are several equivalent ways to define submanifolds:

Proposition

Let be a subset of . The following are equivalent:

  1. is a -dimensional submanifold of ;
  2. is locally the graph of a smooth function. That is, for every , there is a neighbourhood of in , a linear injection and a complementary linear injection ,
    an open subset , and a smooth map such that
  3. is locally the level set of a submersion. That is, for every , there is a neighbourhood of in and a submersion such that
  4. is locally the image of an embedding. That is, for every , there exists a neighbourhood of in , an open set , and a smooth embedding such that .

Embedded Submanifold

Suppose is a smooth manifold with or without boundary. An embedded (or regular) submanifold of is a subset that is a manifold (without boundary) in the subspace topology, endowed with a smooth structure with respect to which the inclusion map is a smooth embedding.

Smooth Chart Lemma