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Orbifolds
In the mathematical disciplines of topology and geometry, an orbifold (for "orbit-manifold") is a generalization of a manifold. Roughly speaking, an orbifold is a topological space that is locally a finite group quotient of a Euclidean space. Definitions of orbifold have been given several times: by Ichirō Satake in the context of automorphic forms in the 1950s under the name ''V-manifold''; by William Thurston in the context of the geometry of 3-manifolds in the 1970s when he coined the name ''orbifold'', after a vote by his students; and by André Haefliger in the 1980s in the context of Mikhail Gromov (mathematician), Mikhail Gromov's programme on CAT(k) spaces under the name ''orbihedron''. Historically, orbifolds arose first as surfaces with Singularity (mathematics), singular points long before they were formally defined. One of the first classical examples arose in the theory of modular forms with the action of the modular group \mathrm(2,\Z) on the upper half-plane: a v ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
William Thurston
William Paul Thurston (October 30, 1946August 21, 2012) was an American mathematician. He was a pioneer in the field of low-dimensional topology and was awarded the Fields Medal in 1982 for his contributions to the study of 3-manifolds. Thurston was a professor of mathematics at Princeton University, University of California, Davis, and Cornell University. He was also a director of the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute. Early life and education William Thurston was born in Washington, D.C., to Margaret Thurston (), a seamstress, and Paul Thurston, an aeronautical engineer. William Thurston suffered from congenital strabismus as a child, causing issues with depth perception. His mother worked with him as a toddler to reconstruct three-dimensional images from two-dimensional ones. He received his bachelor's degree from New College in 1967 as part of its inaugural class. For his undergraduate thesis, he developed an intuitionist foundation for topology. Following th ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
String Theory
In physics, string theory is a theoretical framework in which the point-like particles of particle physics are replaced by one-dimensional objects called strings. String theory describes how these strings propagate through space and interact with each other. On distance scales larger than the string scale, a string acts like a particle, with its mass, charge, and other properties determined by the vibrational state of the string. In string theory, one of the many vibrational states of the string corresponds to the graviton, a quantum mechanical particle that carries the gravitational force. Thus, string theory is a theory of quantum gravity. String theory is a broad and varied subject that attempts to address a number of deep questions of fundamental physics. String theory has contributed a number of advances to mathematical physics, which have been applied to a variety of problems in black hole physics, early universe cosmology, nuclear physics, and condensed matter ph ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Ichirō Satake
(25 December 1927 – 10 October 2014) was a Japanese mathematician working on algebraic groups who introduced the Satake isomorphism and Satake diagrams. He was considered an iconic figure in the theory of linear algebraic groups and symmetric spaces. Satake was born in Tokyo, Japan in 1927, and received his Ph.D. at the University of Tokyo in 1959 under the supervision of Shokichi Iyanaga. He was a professor at University of California, Berkeley from 1968 to 1983. After retirement he returned to Japan, where he spent time at Tohoku University and Chuo University. He died of respiratory failure on 10 October 2014. Although they are often attributed to William Thurston, Satake was the first to introduce orbifold, which he did in the 1950s under the name of ''V-manifold''. In , he gave the modern definition, along with the basic calculus of smooth functions and differential forms. He demonstrated that the de Rham theorem and Poincaré duality, along with their proofs, carry ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Riemann–Roch Theorem
The Riemann–Roch theorem is an important theorem in mathematics, specifically in complex analysis and algebraic geometry, for the computation of the dimension of the space of meromorphic functions with prescribed zeros and allowed poles. It relates the complex analysis of a connected compact Riemann surface with the surface's purely topological genus ''g'', in a way that can be carried over into purely algebraic settings. Initially proved as Riemann's inequality by , the theorem reached its definitive form for Riemann surfaces after work of Riemann's short-lived student . It was later generalized to algebraic curves, to higher-dimensional varieties and beyond. Preliminary notions A Riemann surface X is a topological space that is locally homeomorphic to an open subset of \Complex, the set of complex numbers. In addition, the transition maps between these open subsets are required to be holomorphic. The latter condition allows one to transfer the notions and methods of c ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Manifold With Boundary
In mathematics, a manifold is a topological space that locally resembles Euclidean space near each point. More precisely, an n-dimensional manifold, or ''n-manifold'' for short, is a topological space with the property that each point has a neighborhood that is homeomorphic to an open subset of n-dimensional Euclidean space. One-dimensional manifolds include lines and circles, but not self-crossing curves such as a figure 8. Two-dimensional manifolds are also called surfaces. Examples include the plane, the sphere, and the torus, and also the Klein bottle and real projective plane. The concept of a manifold is central to many parts of geometry and modern mathematical physics because it allows complicated structures to be described in terms of well-understood topological properties of simpler spaces. Manifolds naturally arise as solution sets of systems of equations and as graphs of functions. The concept has applications in computer-graphics given the need to associate ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Isotropy Subgroup
In mathematics, a group action of a group G on a set S is a group homomorphism from G to some group (under function composition) of functions from S to itself. It is said that G acts on S. Many sets of transformations form a group under function composition; for example, the rotations around a point in the plane. It is often useful to consider the group as an abstract group, and to say that one has a group action of the abstract group that consists of performing the transformations of the group of transformations. The reason for distinguishing the group from the transformations is that, generally, a group of transformations of a structure acts also on various related structures; for example, the above rotation group also acts on triangles by transforming triangles into triangles. If a group acts on a structure, it will usually also act on objects built from that structure. For example, the group of Euclidean isometries acts on Euclidean space and also on the figures drawn in i ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Diffeomorphism
In mathematics, a diffeomorphism is an isomorphism of differentiable manifolds. It is an invertible function that maps one differentiable manifold to another such that both the function and its inverse are continuously differentiable. Definition Given two differentiable manifolds M and N, a Differentiable manifold#Differentiability of mappings between manifolds, continuously differentiable map f \colon M \rightarrow N is a diffeomorphism if it is a bijection and its inverse f^ \colon N \rightarrow M is differentiable as well. If these functions are r times continuously differentiable, f is called a C^r-diffeomorphism. Two manifolds M and N are diffeomorphic (usually denoted M \simeq N) if there is a diffeomorphism f from M to N. Two C^r-differentiable manifolds are C^r-diffeomorphic if there is an r times continuously differentiable bijective map between them whose inverse is also r times continuously differentiable. Diffeomorphisms of subsets of manifolds Given a ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Group (mathematics)
In mathematics, a group is a Set (mathematics), set with an Binary operation, operation that combines any two elements of the set to produce a third element within the same set and the following conditions must hold: the operation is Associative property, associative, it has an identity element, and every element of the set has an inverse element. For example, the integers with the addition, addition operation form a group. The concept of a group was elaborated for handling, in a unified way, many mathematical structures such as numbers, geometric shapes and polynomial roots. Because the concept of groups is ubiquitous in numerous areas both within and outside mathematics, some authors consider it as a central organizing principle of contemporary mathematics. In geometry, groups arise naturally in the study of symmetries and geometric transformations: The symmetries of an object form a group, called the symmetry group of the object, and the transformations of a given type form a ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Properly Discontinuous
In mathematics, a group action of a group G on a set S is a group homomorphism from G to some group (under function composition) of functions from S to itself. It is said that G acts on S. Many sets of transformations form a group under function composition; for example, the rotations around a point in the plane. It is often useful to consider the group as an abstract group, and to say that one has a group action of the abstract group that consists of performing the transformations of the group of transformations. The reason for distinguishing the group from the transformations is that, generally, a group of transformations of a structure acts also on various related structures; for example, the above rotation group also acts on triangles by transforming triangles into triangles. If a group acts on a structure, it will usually also act on objects built from that structure. For example, the group of Euclidean isometries acts on Euclidean space and also on the figures drawn in ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Automorphism
In mathematics, an automorphism is an isomorphism from a mathematical object to itself. It is, in some sense, a symmetry of the object, and a way of mapping the object to itself while preserving all of its structure. The set of all automorphisms of an object forms a group, called the automorphism group. It is, loosely speaking, the symmetry group of the object. Definition In an algebraic structure such as a group, a ring, or vector space, an ''automorphism'' is simply a bijective homomorphism of an object into itself. (The definition of a homomorphism depends on the type of algebraic structure; see, for example, group homomorphism, ring homomorphism, and linear operator.) More generally, for an object in some category, an automorphism is a morphism of the object to itself that has an inverse morphism; that is, a morphism f: X\to X is an automorphism if there is a morphism g: X\to X such that g\circ f= f\circ g = \operatorname _X, where \operatorname _X is the identity ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Vertex Algebra
In mathematics, a vertex operator algebra (VOA) is an algebraic structure that plays an important role in two-dimensional conformal field theory and string theory. In addition to physical applications, vertex operator algebras have proven useful in purely mathematical contexts such as monstrous moonshine and the geometric Langlands correspondence. The related notion of vertex algebra was introduced by Richard Borcherds in 1986, motivated by a construction of an infinite-dimensional Lie algebra due to Igor Frenkel. In the course of this construction, one employs a Fock space that admits an action of vertex operators attached to elements of a lattice. Borcherds formulated the notion of vertex algebra by axiomatizing the relations between the lattice vertex operators, producing an algebraic structure that allows one to construct new Lie algebras by following Frenkel's method. The notion of vertex operator algebra was introduced as a modification of the notion of vertex algeb ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
