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The affine plane with doubled origin is formed by gluing two copies of ${\mathbb{A}}_k^2$ by the identity away from the origin. The overlap is the punctured affine plane, so this scheme is nonseparated and the two-open affine cover is not acyclic for the structure sheaf.

The gluing resembles a non-Hausdorff manifold example, but this node concerns an algebraic scheme and its nonseparatedness, not a real manifold.

A non-Hausdorff manifold is a locally Euclidean topological space for which distinct points need not have disjoint neighborhoods. The real line with two origins is a basic example. Nonseparated algebraic schemes exhibit analogous gluing phenomena, but are not generally topological manifolds.

A topological $n$-manifold without boundary is a topological space $M$ satisfying three conditions: it is Hausdorff, it is second countable, and every point $p\in M$ lies in an open set $U\subseteq M$ with a homeomorphism $\phi :U\to V$ onto an open set $V\subseteq {\mathbb{R}}^n$. Here $n\ge 0$ is a fixed dimension of a manifold, and ${\mathbb{R}}^n$ has the usual topology of Euclidean space. The pair $(U,\phi )$ is a coordinate chart. Unless explicitly qualified, “topological manifold” here means without boundary.^[ref]

The Hausdorff condition requires disjoint open neighbourhoods for distinct points. Second countability requires a countable basis of a topology. Neither follows merely from the local homeomorphisms: non-Hausdorff manifolds fail the first condition, while an uncountable disjoint union of copies of the real line fails the second. Indeed, a basis of a topology must supply a different nonempty member inside each copy, so it cannot be countable.

The circle and the real line are both one-dimensional topological manifolds, with the same local model. Their global topologies differ: the circle is compact, while the real line is not. By contrast, the junction of a topological tripod already fails the local test. Thus local coordinate charts specify what kind of small pieces are allowed; global topological invariants distinguish how those pieces fit together.^[ref]

The usefulness of a topological manifold is that local questions about continuity can be transported into Euclidean space, while compactness, connectedness, and the fundamental group still record global information. For calculus, further structure is needed: a smooth atlas requires smooth transition maps, letting the chain rule reconcile derivatives computed in different coordinate charts. A topological atlas by itself only guarantees homeomorphisms between coordinates.^[ref]