Topology in the context of "Surface (mathematics)"

Terrain (from Latin terra 'earth'), alternatively relief or topographical relief, is the dimension and shape of a given surface of a land. In physical geography, terrain is the lay of the land. This is usually expressed in terms of the elevation, slope, and orientation of terrain features. Terrain affects surface water flow and distribution. Over a large area, it can affect weather and climate patterns. Bathymetry is the study of underwater relief, while hypsometry studies terrain relative to sea level.

In geometry, a disk (also spelled disc) is the region in a plane bounded by a circle. A disk is said to be closed if it contains the circle that constitutes its boundary, and open if it does not.

For a radius ${\displaystyle r}$, an open disk is usually denoted as ${\displaystyle D_{r}}$, and a closed disk is ${\displaystyle {\overline {D_{r}}}}$. However in the field of topology the closed disk is usually denoted as ${\displaystyle D^{2}}$, while the open disk is ${\displaystyle \operatorname {int} D^{2}}$.

A cylinder (from Ancient Greek κύλινδρος (kúlindros) 'roller, tumbler') has traditionally been a three-dimensional solid, one of the most basic of curvilinear geometric shapes. In elementary geometry, it is considered a prism with a circle as its base.

A cylinder may also be defined as an infinite curvilinear surface in various modern branches of geometry and topology. The shift in the basic meaning—solid versus surface (as in a solid ball versus sphere surface)—has created some ambiguity with terminology. The two concepts may be distinguished by referring to solid cylinders and cylindrical surfaces. In the literature the unadorned term "cylinder" could refer to either of these or to an even more specialized object, the right circular cylinder.

In mathematics, an algebraic surface is an algebraic variety of dimension two. Thus, an algebraic surface is a solution of a set of polynomial equations, in which there are two independent directions at every point. An example of an algebraic surface is the sphere, which is determined by the single polynomial equation ${\displaystyle x^{2}+y^{2}+z^{2}=1.}$ Studying the intrinsic geometry of algebraic surfaces is a central topic in algebraic geometry. The theory is much more complicated than for algebraic curves (one-dimensional cases), and was developed substantially by the Italian school of algebraic geometry in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.It remains an active field of research.

In the simplest cases, algebraic surfaces are studied as algebraic varieties over the complex numbers. For example, the familiar sphere (for real ${\displaystyle x,y,z}$), becomes a complex (affine) quadric surface, which simultaneously incorporates the sphere and hyperboloids of one and two sheets, and this allows some complications (such as the topology: whether the surface is connected, or simply connected) to be deferred somewhat. Higher degree surfaces include, for example, the Kummer surface. The classification of algebraic surfaces is much more intricate than the classification of algebraic curves, which have dimension one, and is already quite complicated.

Continuity is one of the core concepts of calculus and mathematical analysis, where arguments and values of functions are real and complex numbers. The concept has been generalized to functions between metric spaces and between topological spaces. The latter are the most general continuous functions, and their definition is the basis of topology.

Peter Guthrie Tait FRSE (28 April 1831 – 4 July 1901) was a Scottish mathematical physicist and early pioneer in thermodynamics. He is best known for the mathematical physics textbook Treatise on Natural Philosophy, which he co-wrote with Lord Kelvin, and his early investigations into knot theory.

His work on knot theory contributed to the eventual formation of topology as a mathematical discipline. His name is known in graph theory mainly for Tait's conjecture on cubic graphs. He is also one of the namesakes of the Tait–Kneser theorem on osculating circles.