Cross-polytope Created 2026-10-05 Updated 2026-10-06
The convex hull of the positive and negative coordinate unit vectors. Its boundary triangulates a sphere, and each face contains at most one member of each antipodal pair of coordinate unit vectors. This makes its barycentric subdivision useful for triangulating Real projective space.
For , a self-map of factoring through Real projective space has degree zero when is even, and can have exactly the even degrees when is odd. In the odd case the first map lifts through the double covering and the covering has degree two. The dimension-one exception allows every integer, since .
For a closed oriented manifold of dimension , Poincare duality pairs all rational Betti numbers except the middle one, making their total contribution to the Euler characteristic even. The middle cohomology degree is odd, so its nondegenerate Poincare duality pairing is an alternating bilinear form and has even dimension. Hence the Euler characteristic is even. Nonorientable manifolds can have odd Euler characteristic, as Real projective space of even dimension demonstrates.
This is the CW complex obtained as the increasing union of finite Real projective spaces under their standard inclusions. It has one cell in each nonnegative dimension. Its cellular chain complex has boundary multiplication by two in positive even dimensions and zero in odd dimensions. Consequently its integral cohomology is in degree zero, in positive even degrees and zero in odd degrees. Its mod-two cohomology is in every nonnegative degree.
The cellular cochain complex of finite Real projective space consists of alternating maps zero and two. Its groups can be tensored using the Künneth theorem; the integral Künneth torsion polynomial efficiently counts all tensor and Tor functor summands. A product of factors of dimensions two, three and four has free-rank polynomial and torsion polynomial .
Nematic director 2026-09-28
A nematic director is a unit vector specifying the local unoriented axis of a nematic liquid crystal. Head-tail symmetry identifies with , so the order-parameter space is a Real projective space rather than a sphere.
Odd map between spheres 2026-10-05
An odd map between spheres is a continuous map satisfying . Thus it is equivariant for the two antipodal maps. It descends to a continuous map of Real projective spaces.
The multiplicative norm first rules out zero divisors: if and , then forces . If the dimension is zero the claimed bound already holds, so suppose it is positive.
It is worth checking that the printed description of a ring with an underlying real vector space really permits differentiation of multiplication. This follows from the norm identity even if compatibility with real scalars is not separately stated. For fixed , the map is additive by distributivity, and
It is therefore continuous. Additivity gives rational linearity. Approximating a real number by rationals and using continuity proves for every real . The same argument holds in the other variable. This is automatic real bilinearity from a multiplicative norm, so multiplication is a bilinear map between finite-dimensional vector spaces, and hence is smooth.
Let be the unit sphere of the given positive-definite bilinear form. It is a copy of . The squaring map
is well defined because , and is smooth. Commutativity gives its derivative
For and , the norm identity gives , so the derivative is injective, including on the tangent space . It takes tangent vectors into since maps the sphere to itself. Alternatively, polarization of gives , so directly.
The only identifications under squaring are antipodal:
The factorization uses commutativity, and the last implication uses the absence of zero divisors. Conversely . It follows that induces an injective smooth map
The antipodal quotient map is a local diffeomorphism, so the injectivity of implies injectivity of . Since Real projective space is compact, the stated compact injective immersion is an embedding theorem makes a closed embedding.
For its source and target have the same dimension . The inverse function theorem makes its image open as well as closed in the connected sphere . It is nonempty, so the image is the whole sphere; consequently is a diffeomorphism. But for this is impossible:
Indeed, the antipodal two-sheeted covering map has simply connected total space in this range, and is its universal cover, with deck group . A sphere of dimension at least two is simply connected. These fundamental groups cannot be those of homeomorphic spaces.
We have obtained the dimension bound for a commutative Euclidean normed algebra:
The real numbers and complex numbers with their usual products and Euclidean norms attain dimensions one and two. In dimension two, the induced map is entirely compatible with the argument: the circle squaring map identifies exactly the two antipodal preimages. We neither assume a multiplicative identity nor use a classification of real division algebras; the squaring argument proves the bound from the supplied hypotheses.
For a closed oriented -dimensional manifold and a commutative coefficient ring , Poincare duality says that cap product with the fundamental class is an isomorphism
Over a field it equivalently gives a nondegenerate Poincare duality pairing between complementary cohomological degrees.
For the six-manifold take rational coefficients and write . Poincare duality gives , so the Euler characteristic is
The middle-degree Poincare duality pairing on is skew-symmetric by graded commutativity of the cup product, since . It is a nondegenerate alternating bilinear form, so its dimension is even. For example, a nonsingular skew-symmetric matrix of odd size would have , impossible over . Therefore .
To realize every even integer, use , and . All three are closed connected orientable six-manifolds. For the connected sum of oriented manifolds, removing a ball from each summand and gluing their boundary spheres gives
in dimension six: each removed open ball decreases the Euler characteristic by one, while the gluing sphere has Euler characteristic zero. If , put
omitting zero copies. The Euler characteristic is . This supplies a closed connected orientable example for every .
Without orientability, evenness need not hold. The Real projective space is a closed six-manifold with one cell in each dimension , so
It is nonorientable because the antipodal deck transformation on has degree and reverses orientation. Thus it gives the required counterexample.
Construct the free product from the empty word and all finite alternating words , whose syllables in a free product are nonidentity elements of tagged copies of , with adjacent syllables from different factors. Multiply by concatenating, multiplying adjacent elements in the same factor, and deleting identities until the word is reduced. The normal form theorem for a free product gives a unique result; reducing three concatenated words gives the same result under either parenthesization, so multiplication is associative. The empty word is the identity, and the inverse reverses the word and inverts each syllable. Each factor embeds as words of length one.
The universal property of a free product says that for every group and group homomorphisms there is a unique group homomorphism extending both. Explicitly, send a reduced word to the product of its syllable images; reduction preserves this product. This gives existence, while generation by the two factors gives uniqueness.
A standard form of Klein's combination theorem, or the ping-pong lemma, is the following. Let nontrivial subgroups of the homeomorphisms of a topological space have disjoint nonempty subsets with
Assume also that at least one factor has at least three elements. Then the generated subgroup is . The cardinality hypothesis cannot simply be omitted: the same involution swapping two disjoint sets would otherwise provide a counterexample with both factors equal to .
Here is the ping-pong lemma proof. A reduced word of odd length begins and ends in the same factor, so repeated application of the displayed inclusions sends the other factor's domain into that factor's domain. Disjointness shows that the word is not the identity. For an even reduced word, relabel the factors so that , and invert the word if necessary to make it begin with and end in . Choose . The conjugate reduces to an odd-length word beginning with and ending with , both in , so it is nontrivial. Thus no nonempty reduced word lies in the kernel of the natural group homomorphism , proving the theorem.
For an explicit example, let be the one-dimensional Real projective space, and take the Möbius transformations
For every nonzero integer , sends into , while sends into . Indeed when , and . Both transformations have infinite order. Hence the ping-pong lemma gives , a free product of two nontrivial finitely presented groups.
A finitely presented group admits a group presentation with both and finite; it is the quotient of the free group on by the normal closure of . If
with disjoint generator sets, then
Maps from this group presentation to any group are exactly pairs of maps from and , so the universal property of a free product proves the formula.
For a group homomorphism , choose a word representing for each . The presentation of a semidirect product is
The presentation maps onto the specified semidirect product. Conversely, its conjugation relations allow any word to be written as a word from followed by one from . The natural maps from the two factors to the presented group satisfy the full action relation, because conjugation agrees with first on generators and hence on all elements. They define the reverse group homomorphism . The two maps are inverse on every generator, proving the group isomorphism. There are finitely many cross-relations, so the result is again a finitely presented group.
Apply this to the specified permutation action. The presentation is
Eliminate and . The last cross-relation becomes , already implied by . Thus
Both factors are nontrivial finitely presented groups, as required.
Cells and attaching maps. Regard as the lines in and include as the lines whose last coordinate is zero. Its complement consists of lines with a unique representative , and is therefore an open -cell. Inductively this makes Real projective space a CW complex with one cell in each dimension from zero to .
A characteristic map is obtained from the northern closed hemisphere of : send a unit vector to the line it spans. Its interior maps homeomorphically onto the open cell, while its equator has the antipodal identification. Thus the -cell is attached by the quotient map
which is the antipodal two-sheeted covering. This includes the two endpoints of the one-cell attaching to the zero-cell.
The cellular chain complex has for and zero otherwise. To compute its differential, follow the attaching map by collapse of the -skeleton. The resulting map to has two local contributions. They differ by the mapping degree of the antipodal map on . With compatible cell orientations,
For the two oriented endpoints cancel, giving the same formula. Consecutive differentials compose to zero, as required.
The mod-two cup products. Modulo two every cellular differential vanishes, so cellular cohomology gives a one-dimensional group in each degree . Let be the Poincare dual of a projective hyperplane. This class is nonzero: a projective line transverse to that hyperplane meets it once. Intersecting generic projective hyperplanes produces , and the cup product of their Poincare duals is the Poincare dual of that intersection. In particular, evaluates to one on the mod-two fundamental class. Therefore every , , is nonzero, since otherwise multiplying it by would contradict . Dimension makes . The mod-two cohomology ring of real projective space is
For this simply means the cohomology of a point.
The product with integral coefficients. The final product's coefficients are unstated; take as the default. Dualizing the cellular chain complex above gives
with all unlisted groups zero. The integral Künneth theorem has tensor terms with and Tor functor terms with :
For these finite free cellular complexes it splits additively, though not canonically. Both the tensor and Tor functor of two summands give , so no order-four summands occur.
For an efficient count, write for the free-rank polynomial and for the number of summands in each degree. The integral Künneth torsion polynomial rule is
The last two factors record respectively the tensor contribution in summed degree and the Tor functor contribution one degree lower. The three factors have
The first two give and . Multiplying by the third gives
Consequently the integral cohomology of a product of finite real projective spaces in this case is
If the intended coefficients were instead , the Künneth theorem over a field gives the dimension polynomial
Thus the mod-two groups in degrees zero through nine are respectively
and all other degrees vanish.