In geometry, a torus (: tori or toruses) is a surface of revolution generated by revolving a circle in three-dimensional space one full revolution about an axis that is coplanarity with the circle. The main types of toruses include ring toruses, horn toruses, and spindle toruses. A ring torus is sometimes colloquially referred to as a donut or doughnut.
If the axis of revolution does not touch the circle, the surface has a ring shape and is called a torus of revolution, also known as a ring torus. If the axis of revolution is tangent to the circle, the surface is a horn torus. If the axis of revolution passes twice through the circle, the surface is a spindle torus (or self-crossing torus or self-intersecting torus). If the axis of revolution passes through the center of the circle, the surface is a degenerate torus, a double-covered sphere. If the revolved curve is not a circle, the surface is called a toroid, as in a square toroid.
Real-world objects that approximate a torus of revolution include , and .
A torus should not be confused with a solid torus, which is formed by rotating a disk, rather than a circle, around an axis. A solid torus is a torus plus the volume inside the torus. Real-world objects that approximate a solid torus include , non-inflatable , ring , and .
In topology, a ring torus is homeomorphism to the product topology of two : , and the latter is taken to be the definition in that context. It is a compact 2-manifold of genus 1. The ring torus is one way to embed this space into Euclidean space, but another way to do this is the Cartesian product of the embedding of in the plane with itself. This produces a geometric object called the Clifford torus, a surface in 4-space.
In the field of topology, a torus is any topological space that is homeomorphic to a torus.
An example of a torus can be constructed by taking a rectangular strip of flexible material such as rubber, and joining the top edge to the bottom edge, and the left edge to the right edge, without any half-twists (compare Klein bottle).
The ratio is called the aspect ratio of the torus. The typical doughnut confectionery has an aspect ratio of about 3 to 2.
An implicit equation in Cartesian coordinates for a torus radially symmetric about the z-coordinate axis is
Algebraically eliminating the square root gives a quartic equation,
The three classes of standard tori correspond to the three possible aspect ratios between and :
When , the interior of this torus is diffeomorphism (and, hence, homeomorphic) to a product of a Euclidean open disk and a circle. The volume of this solid torus and the surface area of its torus are easily computed using Pappus's centroid theorem, giving:
These formulae are the same as for a cylinder of length and radius , obtained from cutting the tube along the plane of a small circle, and unrolling it by straightening out (rectifying) the line running around the center of the tube. The losses in surface area and volume on the inner side of the tube exactly cancel out the gains on the outer side.
Expressing the surface area and the volume by the distance of an outermost point on the surface of the torus to the center, and the distance of an innermost point to the center (so that and ), yields
As a torus is the product of two circles, a modified version of the spherical coordinate system is sometimes used. In traditional spherical coordinates there are three measures, , the distance from the center of the coordinate system, and and , angles measured from the center point.
As a torus has, effectively, two center points, the centerpoints of the angles are moved; measures the same angle as it does in the spherical system, but is known as the "toroidal" direction. The center point of is moved to the center of , and is known as the "poloidal" direction. These terms were first used in a discussion of the Earth's magnetic field, where "poloidal" was used to denote "the direction toward the poles".
In modern use, toroidal and poloidal are more commonly used to discuss magnetic confinement fusion devices.
The surface described above, given the relative topology from , is homeomorphic to a topological torus as long as it does not intersect its own axis. A particular homeomorphism is given by stereographically projecting the topological torus into from the north pole of .
The torus can also be described as a quotient of the Cartesian plane under the identifications
The fundamental group of the torus is just the direct product of the fundamental group of the circle with itself:
Intuitively speaking, this means that a closed path that circles the torus's "hole" (say, a circle that traces out a particular latitude) and then circles the torus's "body" (say, a circle that traces out a particular longitude) can be deformed to a path that circles the body and then the hole. So, strictly 'latitudinal' and strictly 'longitudinal' paths commute. An equivalent statement may be imagined as two shoelaces passing through each other, then unwinding, then rewinding.
The fundamental group can also be derived from taking the torus as the quotient (see below), so that may be taken as its universal cover, with deck transformation group .
Its higher Homotopy group are all trivial, since a universal cover projection always induces isomorphisms between the groups and for , and is contractible.
The torus has homology groups:
Thus, the first homology group of the torus is isomorphism to its fundamental group-- which in particular can be deduced from Hurewicz theorem since is abelian group.
The cohomology groups with integer coefficients are isomorphic to the homology ones-- which can be seen either by direct computation, the universal coefficient theorem or even Poincaré duality.
If a torus is punctured and turned inside out then another torus results, with lines of latitude and longitude interchanged. This is equivalent to building a torus from a cylinder, by joining the circular ends together, in two ways: around the outside like joining two ends of a garden hose, or through the inside like rolling a sock (with the toe cut off). Additionally, if the cylinder was made by gluing two opposite sides of a rectangle together, choosing the other two sides instead will cause the same reversal of orientation.
The standard 1-torus is just the circle: . The torus discussed above is the standard 2-torus, . And similar to the 2-torus, the -torus, can be described as a quotient of under integral shifts in any coordinate. That is, the n-torus is modulo the action of the integer lattice (with the action being taken as vector addition). Equivalently, the -torus is obtained from the -dimensional hypercube by gluing the opposite faces together.
An -torus in this sense is an example of an n-dimensional compact space manifold. It is also an example of a compact abelian group Lie group. This follows from the fact that the unit circle is a compact abelian Lie group (when identified with the unit with multiplication). Group multiplication on the torus is then defined by coordinate-wise multiplication.
Toroidal groups play an important part in the theory of compact Lie groups. This is due in part to the fact that in any compact Lie group one can always find a maximal torus; that is, a closed subgroup which is a torus of the largest possible dimension. Such maximal tori have a controlling role to play in theory of connected . Toroidal groups are examples of protorus, which (like tori) are compact connected abelian groups, which are not required to be .
of are easily constructed from automorphisms of the lattice , which are classified by invertible integral matrices of size with an integral inverse; these are just the integral matrices with determinant . Making them act on in the usual way, one has the typical toral automorphism on the quotient.
The fundamental group of an n-torus is a free abelian group of rank . The th homology group of an -torus is a free abelian group of rank n choose . It follows that the Euler characteristic of the -torus is for all . The cohomology ring H•(, Z) can be identified with the exterior algebra over the -module whose generators are the duals of the nontrivial cycles.
For , the quotient is the Möbius strip, the edge corresponding to the orbifold points where the two coordinates coincide. For this quotient may be described as a solid torus with cross-section an equilateral triangle, with a Dehn twist; equivalently, as a triangular prism whose top and bottom faces are connected with a 1/3 twist (120°): the 3-dimensional interior corresponds to the points on the 3-torus where all 3 coordinates are distinct, the 2-dimensional face corresponds to points with 2 coordinates equal and the 3rd different, while the 1-dimensional edge corresponds to points with all 3 coordinates identical.
These orbifolds have found significant applications to music theory in the work of Dmitri Tymoczko and collaborators (Felipe Posada, Michael Kolinas, et al.), being used to model musical triads.
This metric of the square flat torus can also be realised by specific embeddings of the familiar 2-torus into Euclidean 4-space or higher dimensions. Its surface has zero Gaussian curvature everywhere. It is flat in the same sense that the surface of a cylinder is flat. In 3 dimensions, one can bend a flat sheet of paper into a cylinder without stretching the paper, but this cylinder cannot be bent into a torus without stretching the paper (unless some regularity and differentiability conditions are given up, see below).
A simple 4-dimensional Euclidean embedding of a rectangular flat torus (more general than the square one) is as follows:
If and in the above flat torus parametrization form a unit vector then u, v, and parameterize the unit 3-sphere as Hopf coordinates. In particular, for certain very specific choices of a square flat torus in the 3-sphere S3, where above, the torus will partition the 3-sphere into two congruent solid tori subsets with the aforesaid flat torus surface as their common boundary. One example is the torus defined by
Other tori in having this partitioning property include the square tori of the form , where is a rotation of 4-dimensional space , or in other words is a member of the Lie group .
It is known that there exists no (twice continuously differentiable) embedding of a flat torus into 3-space. (The idea of the proof is to take a large sphere containing such a flat torus in its interior, and shrink the radius of the sphere until it just touches the torus for the first time. Such a point of contact must be a tangency. But that would imply that part of the torus, since it has zero curvature everywhere, must lie strictly outside the sphere, which is a contradiction.) On the other hand, according to the Nash-Kuiper theorem, which was proven in the 1950s, an isometric C1 embedding exists. This is solely an existence proof and does not provide explicit equations for such an embedding.
In April 2012, an explicit C1 (continuously differentiable) isometric embedding of a flat torus into 3-dimensional Euclidean space was found. It is a flat torus in the sense that, as a metric space, it is isometric to a flat square torus. It is similar in structure to a fractal as it is constructed by repeatedly corrugating an ordinary torus at smaller scales. Like fractals, it has no defined Gaussian curvature. However, unlike fractals, it does have defined surface normals, yielding a so-called "smooth fractal". The key to obtaining the smoothness of this corrugated torus is to have the amplitudes of successive corrugations decreasing faster than their "wavelengths". (These infinitely recursive corrugations are used only for embedding into three dimensions; they are not an intrinsic feature of the flat torus.) This is the first time that any such embedding was defined by explicit equations or depicted by computer graphics.
M may be turned into a compact space M* – topologically equivalent to a sphere – by adding one additional point that represents the limiting case as a rectangular torus approaches an aspect ratio of 0 in the limit. The result is that this compactified moduli space is a sphere with three points each having less than 2π total angle around them. (Such a point is termed a "cusp", and may be thought of as the vertex of a cone, also called a "conepoint".) This third conepoint will have zero total angle around it. Due to symmetry, M* may be constructed by glueing together two congruent geodesic triangles in the hyperbolic plane along their (identical) boundaries, where each triangle has angles of , , and . (The three angles of a hyperbolic triangle T determine T up to congruence.) As a result, the Gauss–Bonnet theorem shows that the area of each triangle can be calculated as , so it follows that the compactified moduli space M* has area equal to .
The other two cusps occur at the points corresponding in M* to (a) the square torus (total angle ) and (b) the hexagonal torus (total angle ). These are the only conformal equivalence classes of flat tori that have any conformal automorphisms other than those generated by translations and negation.
As examples, a genus zero surface (without boundary) is the sphere while a genus one surface (without boundary) is the ordinary torus. The surfaces of higher genus are sometimes called -holed tori (or, rarely, -fold tori). The terms double torus and triple torus are also occasionally used.
The classification theorem for surfaces states that every compact space connected space surface is topologically equivalent to either the sphere or the connect sum of some number of tori, disks, and real .
double torus | triple torus |
The term "toroidal polyhedron" is also used for higher-genus polyhedra and for immersions of toroidal polyhedra.
At the level of homotopy and homology, the mapping class group can be identified as the action on the first homology (or equivalently, first cohomology, or on the fundamental group, as these are all naturally isomorphic; also the first cohomology group generates the cohomology algebra:
Since the torus is an Eilenberg–MacLane space , its homotopy equivalences, up to homotopy, can be identified with automorphisms of the fundamental group); all homotopy equivalences of the torus can be realized by homeomorphisms – every homotopy equivalence is homotopic to a homeomorphism.
Thus the short exact sequence of the mapping class group splits (an identification of the torus as the quotient of gives a splitting, via the linear maps, as above):
The mapping class group of higher genus surfaces is much more complicated, and an area of active research.
The first 11 numbers of parts, for (including the case of , not covered by the above formulas), are as follows:
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