The Lie bracket of vector fields is bilinear, alternating, satisfies the Jacobi identity, and is natural under diffeomorphisms. Therefore the bracket of two left-invariant vector fields is left-invariant. Define
Then
and the inherited bilinearity, alternation, and Jacobi identity make a Lie algebra.
Applying to a function of and using part vi,
Hence
These are the same left-invariant vector fields in different coordinates.
Let and be the poles of . The open sets and cover the sphere. Stereographic projection gives coordinate charts
from these sets to . Their inverses are
On the overlap, the transition map is
which is a smooth diffeomorphism of . These two compatible charts make a smooth manifold of dimension .
Now let be an -dimensional Lie group and choose a basis of its tangent space at the identity. Define
where is left translation on a Lie group. Smoothness of multiplication makes each a smooth left-invariant vector field, and invertibility of makes a basis of at every point. Thus the form a global frame and every Lie group is a parallelizable manifold.
The columns of a matrix in the special unitary group are orthonormal and its determinant is one. Consequently every element has the unique form
The pair therefore identifies diffeomorphically with . The Lie-group construction then proves that is parallelizable; this is the SU(2) as the three-sphere identification.
Another example is , which is the Lie group . Explicitly, at the vector
is smooth, tangent, and nowhere zero, so it is a global one-vector frame. Thus is another parallelizable sphere.
For in the Lie algebra , set . The one-parameter subgroup law gives the flow law, and
so this is the global flow of the left-invariant vector field .
For , every tangent vector at is the initial velocity of for some . Since ,
Thus all vanish exactly when every derivative of vanishes. This is equivalent to being a locally constant function.