group cohomology, nonabelian group cohomology, Lie group cohomology
cohomology with constant coefficients / with a local system of coefficients
differential cohomology
Riemann integration, Lebesgue integration
line integral/contour integration
integration of differential forms
integration over supermanifolds, Berezin integral, fermionic path integral
Kontsevich integral, Selberg integral, elliptic Selberg integral
integration in ordinary differential cohomology
integration in differential K-theory
The basic concept is for vector spaces, and the remainder are defined in terms of that.
(orientation of a vector space) Given an ordered field and a vector space over of dimension (a natural number), an orientation of is a choice of one of the two equivalence classes of ordered bases? of , where two bases are considered equivalent if the transformation matrix? from one to the other has positive determinant.
In the case , the only ordered basis is the empty list, but we still declare there to be two orientations by fiat, usually called positive and negative. We can make the definition seamless by taking the elements of the equivalence class to be pairs consisting of an ordered basis and a nonzero sign (positive or negative), with iff . This is redundant except in dimension , where now each equivalence class has a single element, for the positive orientation and for the negative orientation (where is the empty list).
In any case, this ensures that if is an orientation, then there is also an opposite orientation .
A fancier way to say the same is
(orientation of a vector space) For a vector space of dimension , an orientation of is an equivalence class of nonzero elements of the line , the th alternating power of , where two such elements are considered equivalent when either (hence each) is a positive multiple of the other.
Note that by both definitions, an orientation of a line (with ) is an equivalence class of nonzero elements.
Assuming that is the field of real numbers or something like it, we can generalize from vector spaces to vector bundles:
(orientation of a vector bundle) For a manifold and a vector bundle of rank , an orientation on is an equivalence class of trivializations? of the line bundle that is obtained by associating to each fiber of its th alternating power.
Equivalently for a smooth manifold this is an equivalence class of an everywhere non-vanishing element of , which may be considered the sign of the element.
(orientation of a manifold) For a manifold of dimension , an orientation of is an orientation of the tangent bundle (or cotangent bundle ).
This is equivalently a choice of everywhere non-vanishing differential form on of degree ; the orientation may be considered the sign of the -form (and the -form's absolute value is a pseudo--form).
A vector space always has an orientation, but a manifold or bundle may not. If an orientation exists, (or ) is called orientable. If is a connected space and (or ) is orientable, then there are exactly orientations; more generally, the entire bundle is orientable iff the restriction to each connected component is orientable, and then the number of orientations is , where is the number of orientable components. (Or we can always say that the number of orientations is , where now is also the number of nonorientable components.)
An orientation on a Riemannian manifold is equivalently a lift of the classifying map of its tangent bundle through the fist step in the Whitehead tower of :
From this perspective a choice of orientation is the first in a series of special structures on that continue with
orientation
For an E-∞ ring spectrum, there is a general notion of -orientation of vector bundles. This is described at
For be the Eilenberg-MacLane spectrum for the discrete abelian group of real numbers, orientation in -cohomology is equivalent to the ordinary notion of orientation described above.
(all hooks are homotopy fiber sequences)
Last revised on May 15, 2023 at 04:43:40. See the history of this page for a list of all contributions to it.