topology (point-set topology, point-free topology)
see also differential topology, algebraic topology, functional analysis and topological homotopy theory
Basic concepts
fiber space, space attachment
Extra stuff, structure, properties
Kolmogorov space, Hausdorff space, regular space, normal space
sequentially compact, countably compact, locally compact, sigma-compact, paracompact, countably paracompact, strongly compact
Examples
Basic statements
closed subspaces of compact Hausdorff spaces are equivalently compact subspaces
open subspaces of compact Hausdorff spaces are locally compact
compact spaces equivalently have converging subnet of every net
continuous metric space valued function on compact metric space is uniformly continuous
paracompact Hausdorff spaces equivalently admit subordinate partitions of unity
injective proper maps to locally compact spaces are equivalently the closed embeddings
locally compact and second-countable spaces are sigma-compact
Theorems
Analysis Theorems
synthetic differential geometry
Introductions
from point-set topology to differentiable manifolds
geometry of physics: coordinate systems, smooth spaces, manifolds, smooth homotopy types, supergeometry
Differentials
Tangency
The magic algebraic facts
Theorems
Axiomatics
Models
differential equations, variational calculus
Chern-Weil theory, ∞-Chern-Weil theory
Cartan geometry (super, higher)
A Cartesian space is a finite Cartesian product of the real line with itself. Hence, a Cartesian space has the form where is some natural number (possibly zero).
What exactly this means depends on which category the real line is being considered as an object of.
For instance, if is regarded as a topological space (hence an object in the category Top), then is a Euclidean space. Another possibility is to regard as a topological manifold, differentiable manifold or smooth manifold (hence an object in the categories TopMfd or Diff), in which case is the archetypical such manifold of dimension (the basic coordinate chart).
The Cartesian space with its standard topology/smooth structure is also called real -dimensional space.
One could also regard as the real vector space of dimension 1, in which case would be the real vector space of dimension (maybe understood as equipped with the linear basis canonically induced by this presentation), hence the “real -dimensional vector space”. However, a vector space would typically not be referred to as a “Cartesian space”.
But in between the last two examples, regarding as an affine space makes it the basis of “analytic geometry” in the sense originally due to René Descartes (Cartesian geometry?), and this is where the term “Cartesian space” originates from.
One might also speak of the complexified cartesian space as a complex manifold, or indeed of the cartesian space for any field , maybe regarded as an analytic space, though this is not common terminology.
In particular:
Cartesian spaces carry plenty of further canonical structure:
It is canonically a metric space and the Euclidean topology is the corresponding metric topology.
There is a canonical smooth structure on that makes it a smooth manifold.
A Cartesian space is canonically avector space over the field of real numbers.
Sometimes one is interested in allowing to take other values, in which case one wants a product in some category that might not be the Cartesian product on underlying sets.
For example, if one is studying Cartesian spaces as inner product spaces, then one might want an -dimensional Cartesian space to be the -dimensional Hilbert space , which is a proper subset of the cartesian product .
The open n-ball is homeomorphic Cartesian space
For all , the open n-ball with its standard smooth structure is diffeomorphic to the Cartesian space with its standard smooth structure
In fact, in there is no choice:
For a natural number with , there is a unique (up to isomorphism) smooth structure on the Cartesian space .
This was shown in (Stallings).
In the analog of this statement is false. One says that on there exist exotic smooth structures.
In dimension for we have:
every open subset of which is homeomorphic to is also diffeomorphic to it.
See the first page of (Ozols) for a list of references.
In dimension 4 the analog statement fails due to the existence of exotic smooth structures on .
See CartSp.
In complex geometry for purposes of Cech cohomology the role of Cartesian spaces is played by Stein manifolds.
Named after René Descartes.
John Stallings, The piecewise linear structure of Euclidean space , Proc. Cambridge Philos. Soc. 58 (1962), 481-488. (pdf)
V. Ozols, Largest normal neighbourhoods , Proceedings of the American Mathematical Society Vol. 61, No. 1 (Nov., 1976), pp. 99-101 (jstor)
There are various slight variations of the category that one can consider without changing its basic properties as a category of test spaces for generalized smooth spaces. A different choice that enjoys some popularity in the literature is the category of open (contractible) subsets of Euclidean spaces. For more references on this see diffeological space.
The site of infinitesimally thickened Cartesian spaces is known as the site for the Cahiers topos. It is considered
in detal in section 5 of
and briefly mentioned in example 2) on p. 191 of
following the original article
With an eye towards Frölicher spaces the site is also considered in section 5 of
Last revised on August 8, 2022 at 08:10:11. See the history of this page for a list of all contributions to it.