ELI5: Explain Like I'm 5

Local diffeomorphism

Okay kiddo, imagine you have a map of your town. It shows all the streets, buildings, parks, and landmarks. Now, a local diffeomorphism is like a special way of looking at your town that allows you to zoom in on a small area of the map, but still understand how everything fits together. It's like putting a magnifying glass on a specific spot on the map.

In grown-up talk, a local diffeomorphism is a mathematical function that maps points from one space to another space. It's called "local" because it only works in a small area of the space, not the entire thing. And it's called "diffeomorphism" because it's a type of function that preserves the geometry of the space, meaning it doesn't change the way things bend, stretch, or twist.

Let's say you have two spaces, space A and space B, and you have a local diffeomorphism f that maps points from space A to space B. What this means is that if you pick a point in space A, you can use the function f to find a corresponding point in space B. And because f is a diffeomorphism, the distance between points in space A is preserved after the mapping. In other words, if two points in space A are close to each other, then their corresponding points in space B will also be close to each other.

So, to sum it up, a local diffeomorphism is a special kind of function that lets you zoom in on a small area of a space and preserve the geometry of that space. It's like a magnifying glass for mathematical spaces.