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.