Induced metric Created 2026-09-29 Updated 2026-10-14
An immersion into a Riemannian manifold inherits the Riemannian metric : measure two tangent vectors after mapping them into the surrounding tangent space. This is a pullback of a Riemannian metric, with
The injective derivative of an immersion makes this inner product positive-definite. For a parametrized surface in Euclidean space, its coefficients are simply the scalar products of the coordinate tangent vectors: the first fundamental form.
For the circular cylinder , the tangent vectors and are orthogonal, with squared norms and . Consequently
The unrolled coordinate gives . This calculation explains intrinsic flatness of a circular cylinder and makes Riemannian distance on a circular cylinder a planar problem with repeated endpoint lifts.
Preserving a Riemannian metric locally preserves the arc length of every mapped curve, but it need not preserve distances measured by unrestricted paths in the surrounding space. The great-circle distance between two sphere points, for example, exceeds their straight chord length unless they coincide. [ref].
The two coordinate tangent vectors of the embedding are
Their Euclidean inner products give the pullback of a Riemannian metric, equivalently the induced metric:
Locally set . The line element becomes , so the induced Riemann curvature tensor vanishes identically. This is the intrinsic flatness of a circular cylinder. Its bending in the ambient space is extrinsic curvature, not intrinsic curvature; periodicity of the angular coordinate does not change the local flatness.
The induced metric is obtained from the ambient Euclidean metric by the pullback of a Riemannian metric operation. Differentiating on a branch with gives . Also . Consequently
The assumption that are coordinates already excludes the equator as well as the poles . On such a chart, and .
The conformal flattening of a surface of revolution supplies the particularly simple conformal factor
Since , these are isothermal coordinates with a flat rescaled metric. An angular coordinate is understood on a local branch; the flat metric may equally be viewed locally as a cylinder metric. The apparent divergence of at the equator is a coordinate failure, not a singularity of the induced metric. For example, give , regular at .
Use the numerator in the original PDF: it contains all squared differentials. The local TeX ends that numerator at , which would not give the stated Riemannian metric.
For the pullback of a Riemannian metric, substitute the embedding . Its differential sends a tangent vector to , so for and . Consequently
The denominator is everywhere positive. For any nonzero tangent vector,
so this is indeed a smooth positive-definite Riemannian metric on .