Vector bundles | Differential topology
Tangent bundle
In differential geometry, the tangent bundle of a differentiable manifold is a manifold which assembles all the tangent vectors in . As a set, it is given by the disjoint union of the tangent spaces of . That is, where denotes the tangent space to at the point . So, an element of can be thought of as a pair , where is a point in and is a tangent vector to at . There is a natural projection defined by . This projection maps each element of the tangent space to the single point . The tangent bundle comes equipped with a natural topology (described in a section ). With this topology, the tangent bundle to a manifold is the prototypical example of a vector bundle (which is a fiber bundle whose fibers are vector spaces). A section of is a vector field on , and the dual bundle to is the cotangent bundle, which is the disjoint union of the cotangent spaces of . By definition, a manifold is parallelizable if and only if the tangent bundle is trivial. By definition, a manifold is if and only if the tangent bundle is stably trivial, meaning that for some trivial bundle the Whitney sum is trivial. For example, the n-dimensional sphere Sn is framed for all n, but parallelizable only for n = 1, 3, 7 (by results of Bott-Milnor and Kervaire). (Wikipedia).
