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Bundle


Hay

The term "bundle" is an abbreviated form of the full term fiber bundle. Depending on context, it may mean one of the special cases of fiber bundles, such as a vector bundle or a principal bundle. Bundles are so named because they contain a collection of objects which, like a bundle of hay, are held together in a special way. All of the fibers line up--or at least they line up to nearby fibers.

Locally, a bundle looks like a product space of an open set in the base and a fiber in a trivialization. The function graph of a function f sits inside the product space as (x,f(x)). The bundle sections of a bundle generalize functions in this way. It is necessary to use bundles when the range of a function only makes sense locally, as in the case of a vector field on the sphere.

The bundle sections over open sets in the base form a sheaf.


See also

Bundle Map, Bundle of Planes, Bundle Section, Fiber Bundle, Line Bundle, Principal Bundle, Sheaf, Tangent Bundle, Trivial Bundle, Vector Bundle

Portions of this entry contributed by Todd Rowland

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Cite this as:

Weisstein, Eric W., with contributions by Todd Rowland. "Bundle." From MathWorld--A Wolfram Resource. https://mathworld.wolfram.com/Bundle.html

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