previously defined by Satake [63], who called them V -manifolds. For a nice intro ductory treatment of orbifolds in a somewhat more restrictive sense, see Stillwell [70, Chapter 8].
The simplest example of an orbifold is the quotient of the plane by a finite group
of rotations about the origin; the quotient is a cone, which is smooth everywhere ex cept at a single conical singularity (the image of the origin). The pillow is an orbifold which is smooth everywhere except at its 4 conical singularities. But the concept of an orbifold is quite subtle. Indeed, just as the pillow is homeomorphic to the sphere S2, every 2-dimensional orbifold is homeomorphic to a 2-dimensional manifold; what distinguishes the orbifold from the manifold is not just what it looks like topologically, but what it is geometrically. In our case, the pillow has the flat Euclidean geometry, and each of the 4 conical singularities has angle rr.