What Is a Manifold?

Re:What Is a Manifold? by Topolomancer on Sunday April 14, 2019 @08:41AM (#19659064)

Good point; I originally wanted to talk about the Poincaré conjecture as well, but then I realized that this would make the post even longer. Do you have some ideas about other interesting topics?

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Re:What Is a Manifold? by JulianWasTaken on Sunday April 14, 2019 @08:56AM (#19659142)

To be honest it's not even my field so I know a lot less than I wish I did but yeah agreed it has no shortage of interesting things to talk about :)

Poincaré Conjecture is yeah interesting to explain though to be honest I vaguely recall an article in similar style to your post that explained it.

Possibly something like describing gradient descent on a manifold is interesting to this audience? Or maybe a post on Flatland? Many possibilities really on good follow ups.

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Re:What Is a Manifold? by amelius on Sunday April 14, 2019 @09:27AM (#19659289)

> Good point

Can a point be a manifold?

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Re:What Is a Manifold? by Topolomancer on Sunday April 14, 2019 @10:20AM (#19659557)

Yes, but it's a simple one of dimension zero. There's not much to do here---every 'neighbourhood' of the point is exactly that: just the point.

(not that there are different 'classes' of manifolds out there; I am not sure if the point would qualify as a Riemannian manifold, for example)

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