Manifold Atlas: About
The mission of the Manifold Atlas is to empower and engage topologists, geometers, historians and philosophers to organize and create knowledge about manifolds and the study of manifolds.
In particular we focus on constructions and invariants, general theory and open problems while providing a forum for posing and answering questions. We also plan to build up historical information as well as philosophical reflections.
Contents |
1 “What is a manifold"
We use the term manifold broadly to mean any second countable Hausdorff space which is locally Euclidean of a fixed dimension and which may, or may not, be equipped with extra structures: for a precise definition see the definition of “manifold".
2 Scientific goals and structure
The Manifold Atlas has two main aims:
- to catalyse the organisation and creation of knowledge about manifolds via the world wide web,
- to serve as a journal standard, citable reference for the study of manifolds.
Thus there are two sorts of pages in the Atlas:
- Evolving pages are continually open to improvement and expansion but are not strongly scientifically citable.
- Static pages will have been approved by the editorial board after a rigorous editorial process.
- Static pages will be instantly recognisable via the blue approval message and the suffix /nth Edition:
- Static pages will be edit-protected and their hard copies serve as scientifically citable documents: they will be the published articles of the Atlas.
3 Writing in the Manifold Atlas
The Manifold Atlas welcomes contributions from anyone with a rigorous interest in manifolds:
- The page Manifold Atlas:Writing in the Atlas Writing in the Atlas describes how and what to write in the Atlas.
The Manifold Atlas supports two types of pages:
- Open-editing pages can be edited openly by any registered user.
- Author-based pages are written by a single author or team of authors.
All content in the Manifold Atlas is freely available on the world wide web as described on the user rights page.
4 Staff
Matthias Kreck : managing editor. Diarmuid Crowley : scientific administraitor. Philipp Kühl : developer and programmer. Martin Steitz : system administrator.
5 Affiliation
The Manifold Atlas is financed by the Hausdorff Center for Mathematics and hosted by the Hausdorff Institute for Mathematics.
6 Platform
The platform for the Manifold Atlas is MediaWiki: special local features were developed by Daniel Müllner.