About: Synthetic differential geometry

In mathematics, synthetic differential geometry is a formalization of the theory of differential geometry in the language of topos theory. There are several insights that allow for such a reformulation. The first is that most of the analytic data for describing the class of smooth manifolds can be encoded into certain fibre bundles on manifolds: namely bundles of jets (see also jet bundle). The second insight is that the operation of assigning a bundle of jets to a smooth manifold is functorial in nature. The third insight is that over a certain category, these are representable functors. Furthermore, their representatives are related to the algebras of dual numbers, so that smooth infinitesimal analysis may be used.