Integrals over Manifolds (part 1)
We’ve defined how to integrate forms over chains made up of singular cubes, but we still haven’t really defined integration on manifolds. We’ve sort of waved our hands at the idea that integrating over a cube is the same as integrating over its image, but this needs firming up. In particular, we will restrict to oriented manifolds.
To this end, we start by supposing that an -form
is supported in the image of an orientation-preserving singular
-cube
. Then we will define
Indeed, here the image of is some embedded submanifold of
that even agrees with its orientation. And since
is zero outside of this submanifold it makes sense to say that the integral over the submanifold — over the singular cube
— is the same as the integral over the whole manifold.
What if we have two orientation-preserving singular cubes and
that both contain the support of
? It only makes sense that they should give the same integral. And, indeed, we find that
where we use to reparameterize our integral. Of course, this function may not be defined on all of
, but it’s defined on
, where
is supported, and that’s enough.
Orientation-Preserving Mappings
Of course now that we have more structure, we have more structured maps. But this time it’s not going to be quite so general; we will only extend our notion of an embedding, and particularly of an embedding in codimension zero.
That is, let be an embedding of manifolds where each of
and
has dimension
. Since their dimensions are the same, the codimension of this embedding — the difference between the dimension of
and that of
— is
. If
and
are both oriented, then we say that
preserves the orientation if the pullback of any
-form on
which gives the chosen orientation gives us an
-form on
which gives its chosen orientation. We easily see that this concept wouldn’t even make sense if
and
didn’t have the same dimension.
More specifically, let and
be oriented by
-forms
and
, respectively. If
for some smooth, everywhere-positive
, we say that
is orientation-preserving. The specific choices of
and
don’t matter; if
gives the same orientation on
then we must have
for some smooth, everywhere-positive
, and
; if
gives the same orientation on
then we must have
for some smooth, everywhere-positive
, and
.
In fact, we have a convenient way of coming up with test forms. Let be a coordinate patch on
around
whose native orientation agrees with that of
, and let
be a similar coordinate patch on
around
. Now we have neighborhoods of
and
between which
is a diffeomorphism, and we have top forms
and
in
and
, respectively. Pulling back the latter form we find
That is, the pullback of the (local) orientation form on differs from the (local) orientation form on
by a factor of the Jacobian determinant of the function
with respect to these coordinate maps. This repeats what we saw in the case of transition functions between coordinates. And so if whenever we pick local coordinates on
and
we find an everywhere-positive Jacobian determinant of
, then
preserves orientation.
