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tangent space

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vector space associated to a point in a smooth manifold, consisting of vectors tangent to it (in some embedding into Euclidean space)

Wikidata facts

Instance of
vector space
Image
Tangentialvektor.svg
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WikiProject Mathematics
Commons category
Tangent space
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Encyclopedic overview

In mathematics, the tangent space of a manifold is a generalization of tangent lines to curves in two-dimensional space and tangent planes to surfaces in three-dimensional space in higher dimensions. In the context of physics, the tangent space to a manifold at a point can be viewed as the space of possible velocities for a particle moving on the manifold.

Informal description

Excerpted from Wikipedia’s “tangent space” article, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.