In mathematics, the tautological bundle is a vector bundle occurring over a Grassmannian in a natural tautological way: the fiber of the bundle over a vector space V (a point in the Grassmannian) is V itself. In the case of projective space the tautological bundle is known as the tautological line bundle.
The tautological bundle is also called the universal bundle since any vector bundle (over a compact space) is a pullback of the tautological bundle; this is to say a Grassmannian is a classifying space for vector bundles. Because of this, the tautological bundle is important in the study of characteristic classes.
Tautological bundles are constructed both in algebraic topology and in algebraic geometry. In algebraic geometry, the tautological line bundle (as invertible sheaf) is
the dual of the hyperplane bundle or Serre's twisting sheaf . The hyperplane bundle is the line bundle corresponding to the hyperplane (divisor) Pn-1 in Pn. The tautological line bundle and the hyperplane bundle are exactly the two generators of the Picard group of the projective space.