In differential geometry, a subject of mathematics, a symplectic manifold is a smooth manifold, , equipped with a closed alternating nondegenerate differential 2-form , called the symplectic form. The study of symplectic manifolds is called symplectic geometry or symplectic topology. Symplectic manifolds arise naturally in abstract formulations of classical mechanics and analytical mechanics as the cotangent bundles of manifolds. For example, in the Hamiltonian formulation of classical mechanics, which provides one of the major motivations for the field, the set of all possible configurations of a system is modeled as a manifold, and this manifold's cotangent bundle describes the phase space of the system. Motivation Symplectic manifolds arise from classical mechanics; in particular, they are a generalization of the phase space of a closed system. In the same way the Hamilton equations allow one to derive the time evolution of a system from a set of differential equations, the symplectic form should allow one to obtain a vector field describing the flow of the system from the differential dH of a Hamiltonian function H. So we require a linear map from the tangent manifold TM to the cotangent manifold T∗M, or equivalently, an element of . Letting ω denote a section of , the requirement that ω be non-degenerate ensures that for every differential dH there is a unique corresponding vector field VH such that . Since one desires the Hamiltonian to be constant along flow lines, one should have , which implies that ω is alternating and hence a 2-form. Finally, one makes the requirement that ω should not change under flow lines, i.e. that the Lie derivative of ω along VH vanishes. Applying Cartan's formula, this amounts to (here is the interior product): so that, on repeating this argument for different smooth functions such that the corresponding span the tangent space at each point the argument is applied at, we see that the requirement for the vanishing Lie derivative along flows of corresponding to arbitrary smooth is equivalent to the requirement that ω should be closed. Definition A symplectic form on a smooth manifold is a closed non-degenerate differential 2-form . Here, non-degenerate means that for every point , the skew-symmetric pairing on the tangent space defined by is non-degenerate. That is to say, if there exists an such that for all , then . Since in odd dimensions, skew-symmetric matrices are always singular, the requirement that be