tangent space
Sign in to savevector space associated to a point in a smooth manifold, consisting of vectors tangent to it (in some embedding into Euclidean space)
~20 min read
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.