
thumb|The imaginary part of the complex logarithm. Trying to define the complex logarithm on \C-\{0\} gives different answers along different paths. This leads to an infinite cyclic monodromy group and a covering of \C-\{0\} by a [[helicoid (an example of a Riemann surface).]]
thumb|The imaginary part of the complex logarithm. Trying to define the complex logarithm on \C-\{0\} gives different answers along different paths. This leads to an infinite cyclic monodromy group and a covering of \C-\{0\} by a [[helicoid (an example of a Riemann surface).]]
In mathematics, monodromy is the study of how objects from mathematical analysis, algebraic topology, algebraic geometry and differential geometry behave as they "run round" a singularity. As the name implies, the fundamental meaning of monodromy comes from "running round singly". It is closely associated with covering maps and their degeneration into ramification; the aspect giving rise to monodromy phenomena is that certain functions we may wish to define fail to be single-valued as we "run round" a path encircling a singularity. The failure of monodromy can be measured by defining a monodromy group: a group of transformations acting on the data that encodes what happens as we "run round" in one dimension. Lack of monodromy is sometimes called polydromy.
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).