In mathematics, the category of manifolds, often denoted Manp, is the category whose objects are manifolds of smoothness class Cp and whose morphisms are p-times continuously differentiable maps. This is a category because the composition of two Cp maps is again continuous and of class Cp.

One is often interested only in Cp-manifolds modeled on spaces in a fixed category A, and the category of such manifolds is denoted Manp(A). Similarly, the category of Cp-manifolds modeled on a fixed space E is denoted Manp(E).

One may also speak of the category of smooth manifolds, Man, or the category of analytic manifolds, Manω.

Manp is a concrete category

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Like many categories, the category Manp is a concrete category, meaning its objects are sets with additional structure (i.e. a topology and an equivalence class of atlases of charts defining a Cp-differentiable structure) and its morphisms are functions preserving this structure. There is a natural forgetful functor

U : ManpTop

to the category of topological spaces which assigns to each manifold the underlying topological space and to each p-times continuously differentiable function the underlying continuous function of topological spaces. Similarly, there is a natural forgetful functor

U′ : ManpSet

to the category of sets which assigns to each manifold the underlying set and to each p-times continuously differentiable function the underlying function.

Pointed manifolds and the tangent space functor

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It is often convenient or necessary to work with the category of manifolds along with a distinguished point: Manp analogous to Top - the category of pointed spaces. The objects of Manp are pairs   where   is a  manifold along with a basepoint   and its morphisms are basepoint-preserving p-times continuously differentiable maps: e.g.   such that  [1] The category of pointed manifolds is an example of a comma category - Manp is exactly   where   represents an arbitrary singleton set, and the  represents a map from that singleton to an element of Manp, picking out a basepoint.

The tangent space construction can be viewed as a functor from Manp to VectR as follows: given pointed manifolds  and   with a  map   between them, we can assign the vector spaces  and   with a linear map between them given by the pushforward (differential):   This construction is a genuine functor because the pushforward of the identity map   is the vector space isomorphism[1]   and the chain rule ensures that  [1]

References

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  1. ^ a b c Tu 2011, pp. 89, 111, 112
  • Lang, Serge (2012) [1972]. Differential manifolds. Springer. ISBN 978-1-4684-0265-0.
  • Tu, Loring W. (2011). An introduction to manifolds (2nd ed.). New York: Springer. ISBN 9781441974006. OCLC 682907530.