Past exam of the mathematics course of the University of Cambridge 2021 iii Paper 313 1 Solution 2026-09-28
Let and be the poles of . The open sets and cover the sphere. Stereographic projection gives coordinate chartsfrom these sets to . Their inverses areOn the overlap, the transition map iswhich 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. Definewhere 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 formThe pair therefore identifies diffeomorphically with . The Lie-group construction then proves that is parallelizable; this is the SU(2) as the three-sphere identification.