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Besides the other answers, things also start to get interesting when you add some qualifiers.

E.g., asking for a "differentiable manifold" now asks for manifolds with enough additional structure to do calculus on top of.



Good point; I originally wanted to talk about the Poincaré conjecture as well, but then I realized that this would make the post even longer. Do you have some ideas about other interesting topics?


To be honest it's not even my field so I know a lot less than I wish I did but yeah agreed it has no shortage of interesting things to talk about :)

Poincaré Conjecture is yeah interesting to explain though to be honest I vaguely recall an article in similar style to your post that explained it.

Possibly something like describing gradient descent on a manifold is interesting to this audience? Or maybe a post on Flatland? Many possibilities really on good follow ups.


> Good point

Can a point be a manifold?


Yes, but it's a simple one of dimension zero. There's not much to do here---every 'neighbourhood' of the point is exactly that: just the point.

(not that there are different 'classes' of manifolds out there; I am not sure if the point would qualify as a Riemannian manifold, for example)




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