Orbifold

This terminology should not be blamed on me. It was obtained by a democratic process in my course of 1976–77. An orbifold is something with many folds; unfortunately, the word “manifold” already has a different definition. I tried “foldamani”, which was quickly displaced by the suggestion of “manifolded”. After two months of patiently saying "no, not a manifold, a manifoldead," we held a vote, and “orbifold” won.

In the mathematical disciplines of topology, geometry, and geometric group theory, an orbifold (for "orbit-manifold") is a generalization of a manifold. It is a topological space (called the underlying space) with an orbifold structure (see below).

The underlying space locally looks like the quotient space of a Euclidean space under the linear action of a finite group. Definitions of orbifold have been given several times: by Satake in the context of automorphic forms in the 1950s under the name V-manifold; by Thurston in the context of the geometry of 3-manifolds in the 1970s when he coined the name orbifold, after a vote by his students; and by Haefliger in the 1980s in the context of Gromov's programme on CAT(k) spaces under the name orbihedron. The definition of Thurston will be described here: it is the most widely used and is applicable in all cases.