Talk:Riemannian manifold

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I've come to terms with the fact that I will never understand this.

You know, the article is much too short. It could stand to have many examples and explanatory sentences added. Perhaps you could help us decide how best to improve it, with focused questions. at what point does the exposition lose you? if you ask for more, you might receive it... - Lethe

I added a paragraph to the article. I should probably look it over again tomorrow to make sure it's coherent, but I want to make the basic idea of a Riemannian manifold transparent; an inner product gives you a notion of length on a vector space, and a Riemannian metric gives you a notion of length on a smooth manifold by defining an inner product on each tangent space, pointwise, in a smooth way. to pass from a notion of length of a tangent vector to length of a curve on the manifold, all you have to do is integrate. There is a lot more you can do with Riemannian geometry, but if you can grasp that starting notion, then the rest should fall into place. I guess what I'm saying is, if you think the article is incomprehensible, you may be right. Asking for clarification might be a good idea.... Lethe

-- I think my new paragraph here kinda sticks out like a sore thumb. I don't like it, and perhaps it belongs in a different article (differential geometry, perhaps?) I'm looking for feedback, i guess. - Lethe 00:17, Jul 17, 2004 (UTC)

Hi Lethe, relatively new contributor here. What I'm thinking would be useful, is some initial mention for motivation -- why did Riemann introduce this concept, what could it effectively model? Including a few sentences outlining such information, optimally as a continuance of the first paragraph, would substantially improve the overall quality of this article. Geo.per 19:21, 26 June 2006 (UTC)

I went back and added a few section headers. Lumping everything under Introduction seems inappropriate. Actually, a more thorough list of properties should probably be added. Geo.per 19:26, 26 June 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Riemann for Anti-Dummies

Deleted external link to http://wlym.com/tiki/tiki-index.php?page=Pedagogicals Riemann for Anti-Dummies. The site was of questionable authority and had a very non-neutral point of view.

You were right to delete the link, thanks. I found two more articles with the same link and also deleted it there. However, for future reference, you accidentally deleted a bit more than just the link: categories like [[Category:Riemannian geometry| ]] and interwiki links like [[de:Riemannsche Mannigfaltigkeit]] . Please leave them next time. Anyway, I fixed it now. -- Jitse Niesen (talk) 03:14, 19 February 2007 (UTC)

[edit] For The Lay(er) Man

Is there any chance that one could have a paragraph (or two) about What this means with less of the math? I realize that one would have to make assupmtions etc. in order to explain this to others. E.Lefraw 23:19, 23 February 2007 (UTC)