Flat manifold
In mathematics, a Riemannian manifold is said to be flat if its curvature is everywhere zero. Intuitively, a flat manifold is one that "locally looks like" Euclidean space in terms of distances and angles, e.g. the interior angles of a triangle add up to 180°.
The universal cover of a complete flat manifold is Euclidean space. This can be used to prove the theorem of Bieberbach (1911, 1912) that all compact flat manifolds are finitely covered by tori; the 3-dimensional case was proved earlier by Schoenflies (1891).
Contents
Examples
The following manifolds can be endowed with a flat metric. Note that this may not be their 'standard' metric (for example, the flat metric on the 2-dimensional torus is not the metric induced by its usual embedding into ).
Dimension 1
- The line
- The circle
Dimension 2
- The plane
- The cylinder
- The Moebius band
- The Klein bottle
- The 2-dimensional torus. A flat torus can be isometrically embedded in three-dimensional Euclidean space with a C1 map (by the Nash embedding theorem) but not with a C2 map, and the Clifford torus provides an isometric analytic embedding of a flat torus in four dimensions.
There are 17 compact 2-dimensional orbifolds with flat metric (including the torus and Klein bottle), listed in the article on orbifolds, that correspond to the 17 wallpaper groups.
Dimension 3
For the complete list of the 6 orientable and 4 non-orientable compact examples see Seifert fiber space.
Higher dimensions
- Euclidean space
- Tori
- Products of flat manifolds
- Quotients of flat manifolds by groups acting freely.
See also
References
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