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by woopwoop 3076 days ago
>Manifolds are just graphs with many vertices.

Okay, I'll bite. How? What is the definition of the tangent space? Dimension?

2 comments

Yeah you'll want hypergraphs (or even better simplicial complexes) in general but you can make sense of manifolds as discrete objects. In fact I'm fairly sure you can triangulate any (smooth?) manifold.

The tangent space can be defined in terms of derivations, as soon as you define what a smooth function on the 'discrete' manifold should look like (you may have to define the derivative at a face, rather than a vertex, or have the function take values on faces rather than vertices).

Sure. I think the notion of a manifold wouldn't be very interesting if it didn't have some kind of discrete analogue. But, for me at least, smooth manifolds are much easier to think about than simplicial complexes or PL manifolds.
the tangent space is the set of edges

vector fields (sections of the tangent bundle) correspond to real-valued functions defined on edges

dimension is always 2 ;)

if you want higher dimension you have to consider higher-dimensional cliques beyond edges (that are 2-cliques): triangles, tetrahedra, and so on. But very often this is not necessary, even when discretizing 3d stuff. For example, for Poisson equation, and the associated classical pde, you only need the laplacian, which acts on functions, regardless of the dimension.

That seems a weird choice of tangent space, surely a circle and a disk should have different tangent spaces?
And they do. When you discretize a circle as a graph, all the edges are along the boundary. When you discretize the disk, you fill its whole interior with edges in all directions.
Is a triangle a circle or a disk?