Riemannian Manifold - Overview

Overview

The tangent bundle of a smooth manifold M assigns to each fixed point of M a vector space called the tangent space, and each tangent space can be equipped with an inner product. If such a collection of inner products on the tangent bundle of a manifold varies smoothly as one traverses the manifold, then concepts that were defined only pointwise at each tangent space can be extended to yield analogous notions over finite regions of the manifold. For example, a smooth curve α(t): → M has tangent vector α′(t₀) in the tangent space TM(α(t₀)) at any point t₀ ∈ (0, 1), and each such vector has length ‖α′(t₀)‖, where ‖·‖ denotes the norm induced by the inner product on TM(α(t₀)). The integral of these lengths gives the length of the curve α:

Smoothness of α(t) for t in guarantees that the integral L(α) exists and the length of this curve is defined.

In many instances, in order to pass from a linear-algebraic concept to a differential-geometric one, the smoothness requirement is very important.

Every smooth submanifold of Rn has an induced Riemannian metric g: the inner product on each tangent space is the restriction of the inner product on Rn. In fact, as follows from the Nash embedding theorem, all Riemannian manifolds can be realized this way. In particular one could define Riemannian manifold as a metric space which is isometric to a smooth submanifold of Rn with the induced intrinsic metric, where isometry here is meant in the sense of preserving the length of curves. This definition might theoretically not be flexible enough, but it is quite useful to build the first geometric intuitions in Riemannian geometry.