Technical Details
In detail, the question applies to the 'round spheres' and to their tangent bundles: in fact since all exotic spheres have isomorphic tangent bundles, the Radon–Hurwitz numbers ρ(N) determine the maximum number of linearly independent sections of the tangent bundle of any homotopy sphere. The case of N odd is taken care of by the Poincaré–Hopf index theorem (see hairy ball theorem), so the case N even is an extension of that. Adams showed that the maximum number of continuous (smooth would be no different here) pointwise linearly-independent vector fields on the (N − 1)-sphere is exactly ρ(N) − 1.
The construction of the fields is related to the real Clifford algebras, which is a theory with a periodicity modulo 8 that also shows up here. By the Gram–Schmidt process, it is the same to ask for (pointwise) linear independence or fields that give an orthonormal basis at each point.
Read more about this topic: Vector Fields On Spheres
Famous quotes containing the words technical and/or details:
“When you see something that is technically sweet, you go ahead and do it and you argue about what to do about it only after you have had your technical success. That is the way it was with the atomic bomb.”
—J. Robert Oppenheimer (1904–1967)
“Then he told the news media
the strange details of his death
and they hammered him up in the marketplace
and sold him and sold him and sold him.
My death the same.”
—Anne Sexton (1928–1974)