Solution

ID: past-exam-of-the-mathematics-course-of-the-university-of-cambridge/2015/iii/paper-56/1/solution

Rescale the ambient coordinates by . For each and , take the relatively open set where . Define a manifold chart by retaining all the except :
Here is the open unit open unit ball. The inverse of this manifold chart is explicit:
The coordinate labels in retain their original indices. All the are nonzero, so this inverse exists; the strictly positive radicand makes it smooth on the whole open open unit ball. Projection and this inverse are continuous, so each manifold chart is a homeomorphism onto an open subset of .
These manifold charts cover the ellipsoid, because at every point at least one is nonzero. On an overlap with a different chart , the coordinates of are the retained for together with
Its domain is the open subset of . The displayed functions, and the reverse transition functions obtained by exchanging , are smooth. Transitions between identical charts are the identity; opposite-sign charts with the same omitted coordinate do not overlap. The ambient subspace topology is Hausdorff and second countable, as it is inherited from Euclidean space. Thus this coordinate-projection atlas of an ellipsoid is a smooth atlas, proving the ellipsoid is a smooth manifold of dimension . The rescaling also gives a diffeomorphism with the unit sphere .
For the three-sphere, use its identification with SU(2) rather than separate local constructions. With the Pauli matrices , put . These form a real basis of the SU(2) Lie algebra and satisfy
For , the identification SU(2) as the three-sphere is
The matrix is unitary with determinant one. Conversely, every SU(2) matrix has this form, and both the correspondence and its inverse are smooth.
The left translations are diffeomorphisms. Define three left-invariant vector fields by
Matrix multiplication makes these vector fields smooth globally. Since is an isomorphism from the SU(2) Lie algebra to , the three vectors are linearly independent at every point, and each is nowhere zero. This is the parallelization of a Lie group by left translations.
Transporting the left-invariant vector fields to the three-sphere gives the quaternionic left-invariant frame on the three-sphere:
Directly, and on the unit three-sphere. Thus the vectors are tangent and form a global orthonormal frame of a vector bundle. The three-sphere is a parallelizable manifold, with tangent bundle .

New to topics? Read the docs here!