Timeline of manifolds

Okay kiddo, so a manifold is like a really fancy type of shape. Imagine playing with LEGO blocks and building a castle. Now, imagine that each block is a tiny little shape, like a cube or a rectangle.

If we were to take a bunch of those shapes and put them together in a way that they all connect perfectly and create a 3D shape, that would be a type of manifold.

Now, humans started thinking about manifolds a long time ago, but it wasn't until the 1800s that people really started to go deep and learn more about them.

A mathematician named Bernhard Riemann came up with some really important ideas and theories about manifolds, and scientists and mathematicians have been building on those ideas ever since.

Imagine each of these ideas as a different level of LEGO building. Riemann built the foundation, and then other people started stacking blocks on top of it and making it bigger and bigger.

As they learned more about manifolds, they started to see that they could be used to understand really complicated things like our universe and how it works.

So now, scientists and mathematicians are still building on those early ideas from Riemann, trying to understand more about the shapes in our world and how they all fit together.