A Riemann surface is a connected one-dimensional complex manifold, first studied by and named after Bernhard Riemann. Riemann surfaces can be thought of as deformed versions of the complex plane: locally, near every point, they look like patches of the complex plane, but their global topology can differ greatly, resembling a sphere, a torus, or several sheets glued together, as seen in the graphs of multivalued functions such as the square root or the logarithm. Every Riemann surface is a surface in the sense of a two-dimensional real manifold, but carries the additional structure of a complex structure, and conversely a two-dimensional real manifold can be turned into a Riemann surface, usually in several inequivalent ways, if and only if it is orientable and metrizable; under this correspondence the sphere and torus admit complex structures but the Mobius strip, Klein bottle and real projective plane do not. Every compact Riemann surface is a complex algebraic curve, by the Riemann-Roch theorem and Chow's theorem.
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1. Wikipedia: Riemann surface
Definitions section, first sentenceQuote, Definitions section, first sentence
A Riemann surface X is a connected complex manifold of complex dimension one.
View the Source 2. Riemann (MacTutor History of Mathematics)
Biography, paragraph on return to Göttingen and PhD thesisQuote, Biography, paragraph on return to Göttingen and PhD thesis
In 1849 he returned to Göttingen and his Ph.D. thesis, supervised by Gauss, was submitted in 1851.
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