3-torus

The three-dimensional torus, or 3-torus, is defined as any topological space that is homeomorphic to the Cartesian product of three circles, ${\displaystyle \mathbb {T} ^{3}=S^{1}\times S^{1}\times S^{1}.}$ In contrast, the usual torus is the Cartesian product of only two circles.

The 3-torus is a three-dimensional compact manifold with no boundary. It can be obtained by "gluing" the three pairs of opposite faces of a cube, where being "glued" can be intuitively understood to mean that when a particle moving in the interior of the cube reaches a point on a face, it goes through it and appears to come forth from the corresponding point on the opposite face, producing periodic boundary conditions. Gluing only one pair of opposite faces produces a solid torus while gluing two of these pairs produces the solid space between two nested tori.

In 1984, Alexei Starobinsky and Yakov Zeldovich at the Landau Institute in Moscow proposed a cosmological model where the shape of the universe is a 3-torus.

References

Sources

• Thurston, William P. (1997), Three-dimensional Geometry and Topology, Volume 1, Princeton University Press, p. 31, ISBN 9780691083049.
• Weeks, Jeffrey R. (2001), The Shape of Space (2nd ed.), CRC Press, p. 13, ISBN 9780824748371.

1. Torus
2. Torus knot
3. 3-manifold
4. Stanford torus
5. Solid torus
6. Shape of the universe
7. Torus fracture
8. Prime knot
9. Torus palatinus
10. Torus tubarius
11. Trefoil knot
12. Clifford torus
13. Genus g surface
14. Mean reciprocal rank
15. List of manifolds
16. Maximal torus
17. Gimbal lock
18. Geometrization conjecture
19. Umbilic torus
20. Didicosm