Talk:Gauss–Bonnet theorem

What about the generalized version?
I have started Pfaffian, so maybe someone can do Generalized Gauss-Bonnet theorem??? Tosha 05:52, 16 Mar 2004 (UTC)

A and s
What is A and what is s in the formula?

A is a differential-2-form, which represents the "surface" of the manifold M. Simililarly, s is a one-form (also called Pfaffian form), which represents the border of M (which is one-dimensional).

Orientable?
Does the manifold really have to be orientable? AxelBoldt 01:07, 21 April 2006 (UTC)
 * I don't think so. AFAIK, it just must be able to be triangulated (to get the Euler characteristic), but other than that there are no requirements on the surface. cBuckley (Talk &#8226; Contribs) 17:37, 21 April 2006 (UTC)
 * The Russians also don't mention orientability, so I'll make the change. AxelBoldt 01:06, 23 April 2006 (UTC)
 * Orientability is related to the existence of a metric. For example, a projective space has no metric, and is also unorientable.  In the absence of a metric, the boundary integral of the theorem has no meaning.  Nevertheless, the requirement that the manifold be Riemannian necessarily implies the use of the Riemannian metric.  Therefore, the manifold must be orientable.  Specifying that it must be so is therefore unnecessary, but it does contribute to clarity of exposition, which is, after all, one goal of a wikipedia article.  6 October 2008

—Preceding unsigned comment added by 75.134.153.115 (talk) 17:35, 6 October 2008 (UTC)


 * Any paracompact differentiable manifold has a metric, regardless of its orientability or lack thereof. The statement of the theorem still holds for non-orientable manfolds.  In most formulations of the theorem, the integrals require only the surface measure to be well-defined (which only needs the metric, not an orientation).  Some versions of the theorem, however, involve the Pfaffian of the curvature, and these require orientability.   siℓℓy rabbit  (  talk  ) 19:57, 6 October 2008 (UTC)

Move application section?
It seems to me the application section should be moved since it's really just an application of Euler's formula. The Gauss–Bonnet theorem is only used to show that the Euler characteristic of the sphere is 2 and there are much more elementary ways of doing that. --RDBury (talk) 01:37, 29 February 2008 (UTC)

Agreed. It makes no sense to use Euler's formula once then purposefully avoid it to compute chi of a sphere via Gauss-Bonnet. Instead of deleting this section, I'm moving it to the page on Euler characteristic. Jjauregui (talk) 02:49, 10 April 2009 (UTC)

Where is proof?
It would be great to provide the proof either in the article directly or via references. --Wladik Derevianko (talk) 20:49, 29 December 2009 (UTC)

Assessment comment
Substituted at 02:08, 5 May 2016 (UTC)

Example in 3-D
I'm not at all familiar with the subject matter, but I feel like an excellent addition to this page would be a description of how this theorem could be applied to a surface in 3D, which would make it a lot more intuitive. I'm not sure if the cited textbooks give any such examples. Wiki47222 (talk) 19:37, 24 October 2022 (UTC)