Orbifold

Imagine playing with Play-Doh and trying to make a ball. Now imagine trying to flatten that ball like a pancake. When you do this, the edges of the pancake might not be smooth because of the way you flattened it.

This is kind of like what an orbifold is in math. An orbifold is a special kind of shape that has some parts that are smooth and some parts that are not smooth, just like the edges of a flattened Play-Doh ball.

The smooth parts of an orbifold are just like any other shape you might see in math, like a circle or a triangle. But the not-so-smooth parts are where things get interesting. These parts might have things like corners or edges that are not connected to other edges.

Orbifolds are really cool because they help us understand how shapes can be different from regular, smooth shapes that we might be used to seeing in math. They can also help us understand how different shapes connect to each other and how we can use math to describe these connections.