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Bundle Metric
In differential geometry, the notion of a metric tensor can be extended to an arbitrary vector bundle, and to some principal fiber bundles. This metric is often called a bundle metric, or fibre metric. Definition If ''M'' is a topological manifold and : ''E'' → ''M'' a vector bundle on ''M'', then a metric on ''E'' is a bundle map ''k'' : ''E'' ×''M'' ''E'' → ''M'' × R from the fiber product of ''E'' with itself to the trivial bundle with fiber R such that the restriction of ''k'' to each fibre over ''M'' is a nondegenerate bilinear map of vector spaces.. Roughly speaking, ''k'' gives a kind of dot product (not necessarily symmetric or positive definite) on the vector space above each point of ''M'', and these products vary smoothly over ''M''. Properties Every vector bundle with paracompact base space can be equipped with a bundle metric. For a vector bundle of rank ''n'', this follows from the bundle charts \phi:\pi^(U)\to U\times\mathbb^n: the bundle m ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Differential Geometry
Differential geometry is a mathematical discipline that studies the geometry of smooth shapes and smooth spaces, otherwise known as smooth manifolds. It uses the techniques of differential calculus, integral calculus, linear algebra and multilinear algebra. The field has its origins in the study of spherical geometry as far back as antiquity. It also relates to astronomy, the geodesy of the Earth, and later the study of hyperbolic geometry by Lobachevsky. The simplest examples of smooth spaces are the plane and space curves and surfaces in the three-dimensional Euclidean space, and the study of these shapes formed the basis for development of modern differential geometry during the 18th and 19th centuries. Since the late 19th century, differential geometry has grown into a field concerned more generally with geometric structures on differentiable manifolds. A geometric structure is one which defines some notion of size, distance, shape, volume, or other rigidifying structu ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Riemannian Metric
In differential geometry, a Riemannian manifold or Riemannian space , so called after the German mathematician Bernhard Riemann, is a real, smooth manifold ''M'' equipped with a positive-definite inner product ''g''''p'' on the tangent space ''T''''p''''M'' at each point ''p''. The family ''g''''p'' of inner products is called a Riemannian metric (or Riemannian metric tensor). Riemannian geometry is the study of Riemannian manifolds. A common convention is to take ''g'' to be smooth, which means that for any smooth coordinate chart on ''M'', the ''n''2 functions :g\left(\frac,\frac\right):U\to\mathbb are smooth functions. These functions are commonly designated as g_. With further restrictions on the g_, one could also consider Lipschitz Riemannian metrics or measurable Riemannian metrics, among many other possibilities. A Riemannian metric (tensor) makes it possible to define several geometric notions on a Riemannian manifold, such as angle at an intersection, length of a ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Scalar Curvature
In the mathematical field of Riemannian geometry, the scalar curvature (or the Ricci scalar) is a measure of the curvature of a Riemannian manifold. To each point on a Riemannian manifold, it assigns a single real number determined by the geometry of the metric near that point. It is defined by a complicated explicit formula in terms of partial derivatives of the metric components, although it is also characterized by the volume of infinitesimally small geodesic balls. In the context of the differential geometry of surfaces, the scalar curvature is twice the Gaussian curvature, and completely characterizes the curvature of a surface. In higher dimensions, however, the scalar curvature only represents one particular part of the Riemann curvature tensor. The definition of scalar curvature via partial derivatives is also valid in the more general setting of pseudo-Riemannian manifolds. This is significant in general relativity, where scalar curvature of a Lorentzian metric is one of t ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Vertical Subspace
In mathematics, the vertical bundle and the horizontal bundle are vector bundles associated to a smooth fiber bundle. More precisely, given a smooth fiber bundle \pi\colon E\to B, the vertical bundle VE and horizontal bundle HE are subbundles of the tangent bundle TE of E whose Whitney sum satisfies VE\oplus HE\cong TE. This means that, over each point e\in E, the fibers V_eE and H_eE form complementary subspaces of the tangent space T_eE. The vertical bundle consists of all vectors that are tangent to the fibers, while the horizontal bundle requires some choice of complementary subbundle. To make this precise, define the vertical space V_eE at e\in E to be \ker(d\pi_e). That is, the differential d\pi_e\colon T_eE\to T_bB (where b=\pi(e)) is a linear surjection whose kernel has the same dimension as the fibers of \pi. If we write F=\pi^(b), then V_eE consists of exactly the vectors in T_eE which are also tangent to F. The name is motivated by low-dimensional examples like the triv ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Tangent Space
In mathematics, the tangent space of a manifold generalizes to higher dimensions the notion of '' tangent planes'' to surfaces in three dimensions and ''tangent lines'' to curves in two dimensions. In the context of physics the tangent space to a manifold at a point can be viewed as the space of possible velocities for a particle moving on the manifold. Informal description In differential geometry, one can attach to every point x of a differentiable manifold a ''tangent space''—a real vector space that intuitively contains the possible directions in which one can tangentially pass through x . The elements of the tangent space at x are called the ''tangent vectors'' at x . This is a generalization of the notion of a vector, based at a given initial point, in a Euclidean space. The dimension of the tangent space at every point of a connected manifold is the same as that of the manifold itself. For example, if the given manifold is a 2 -sphere, then one can picture the ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Connection Form
In mathematics, and specifically differential geometry, a connection form is a manner of organizing the data of a connection using the language of moving frames and differential forms. Historically, connection forms were introduced by Élie Cartan in the first half of the 20th century as part of, and one of the principal motivations for, his method of moving frames. The connection form generally depends on a choice of a coordinate frame, and so is not a tensorial object. Various generalizations and reinterpretations of the connection form were formulated subsequent to Cartan's initial work. In particular, on a principal bundle, a principal connection is a natural reinterpretation of the connection form as a tensorial object. On the other hand, the connection form has the advantage that it is a differential form defined on the differentiable manifold, rather than on an abstract principal bundle over it. Hence, despite their lack of tensoriality, connection forms continue to be used ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Metric Space
In mathematics, a metric space is a set together with a notion of ''distance'' between its elements, usually called points. The distance is measured by a function called a metric or distance function. Metric spaces are the most general setting for studying many of the concepts of mathematical analysis and geometry. The most familiar example of a metric space is 3-dimensional Euclidean space with its usual notion of distance. Other well-known examples are a sphere equipped with the angular distance and the hyperbolic plane. A metric may correspond to a metaphorical, rather than physical, notion of distance: for example, the set of 100-character Unicode strings can be equipped with the Hamming distance, which measures the number of characters that need to be changed to get from one string to another. Since they are very general, metric spaces are a tool used in many different branches of mathematics. Many types of mathematical objects have a natural notion of distance and t ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Lie Algebra Representation
In the mathematical field of representation theory, a Lie algebra representation or representation of a Lie algebra is a way of writing a Lie algebra as a set of matrices (or endomorphisms of a vector space) in such a way that the Lie bracket is given by the commutator. In the language of physics, one looks for a vector space V together with a collection of operators on V satisfying some fixed set of commutation relations, such as the relations satisfied by the angular momentum operators. The notion is closely related to that of a representation of a Lie group. Roughly speaking, the representations of Lie algebras are the differentiated form of representations of Lie groups, while the representations of the universal cover of a Lie group are the integrated form of the representations of its Lie algebra. In the study of representations of a Lie algebra, a particular ring, called the universal enveloping algebra, associated with the Lie algebra plays an important role. The universa ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Associated Bundle
In mathematics, the theory of fiber bundles with a structure group G (a topological group) allows an operation of creating an associated bundle, in which the typical fiber of a bundle changes from F_1 to F_2, which are both topological spaces with a group action of G. For a fiber bundle ''F'' with structure group ''G'', the transition functions of the fiber (i.e., the cocycle) in an overlap of two coordinate systems ''U''α and ''U''β are given as a ''G''-valued function ''g''αβ on ''U''α∩''U''β. One may then construct a fiber bundle ''F''′ as a new fiber bundle having the same transition functions, but possibly a different fiber. An example A simple case comes with the Möbius strip, for which G is the cyclic group of order 2, \mathbb_2. We can take as F any of: the real number line \mathbb, the interval 1,\ 1/math>, the real number line less the point 0, or the two-point set \. The action of G on these (the non-identity element acting as x\ \rightarrow\ -x in each ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Haar Measure
In mathematical analysis, the Haar measure assigns an "invariant volume" to subsets of locally compact topological groups, consequently defining an integral for functions on those groups. This measure was introduced by Alfréd Haar in 1933, though its special case for Lie groups had been introduced by Adolf Hurwitz in 1897 under the name "invariant integral". Haar measures are used in many parts of analysis, number theory, group theory, representation theory, statistics, probability theory, and ergodic theory. Preliminaries Let (G, \cdot) be a locally compact Hausdorff topological group. The \sigma-algebra generated by all open subsets of G is called the Borel algebra. An element of the Borel algebra is called a Borel set. If g is an element of G and S is a subset of G, then we define the left and right translates of S by ''g'' as follows: * Left translate: g S = \. * Right translate: S g = \. Left and right translates map Borel sets onto Borel sets. A measure \mu on th ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Pushforward (differential)
In differential geometry, pushforward is a linear approximation of smooth maps on tangent spaces. Suppose that is a smooth map between smooth manifolds; then the differential of ''φ, d\varphi_x,'' at a point ''x'' is, in some sense, the best linear approximation of ''φ'' near ''x''. It can be viewed as a generalization of the total derivative of ordinary calculus. Explicitly, the differential is a linear map from the tangent space of ''M'' at ''x'' to the tangent space of ''N'' at ''φ''(''x''), d\varphi_x: T_xM \to T_N. Hence it can be used to ''push'' tangent vectors on ''M'' ''forward'' to tangent vectors on ''N''. The differential of a map ''φ'' is also called, by various authors, the derivative or total derivative of ''φ''. Motivation Let \varphi: U \to V be a smooth map from an open subset U of \R^m to an open subset V of \R^n. For any point x in U, the Jacobian of \varphi at x (with respect to the standard coordinates) is the matrix representation of the total d ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
