In mathematics, comparison theorems are theorems whose statement involves comparisons between various mathematical objects of the same type, and often occur in fields such as calculus, differential equations and Riemannian geometry.
In the theory of differential equations, comparison theorems assert particular properties of solutions of a differential equation (or of a system thereof), provided that an auxiliary equation/inequality (or a system thereof) possesses a certain property. Differential (or integral) inequalities, derived from differential (respectively, integral) equations by replacing the equality sign with an inequality sign, form a broad class of such auxiliary relations. [1] [2]
One instance of such theorem was used by Aronson and Weinberger to characterize solutions of Fisher's equation, a reaction-diffusion equation. [3] Other examples of comparison theorems include:
In Riemannian geometry, it is a traditional name for a number of theorems that compare various metrics and provide various estimates in Riemannian geometry. [4]
Riemannian geometry is the branch of differential geometry that studies Riemannian manifolds, defined as smooth manifolds with a Riemannian metric. This gives, in particular, local notions of angle, length of curves, surface area and volume. From those, some other global quantities can be derived by integrating local contributions.
In mathematics, the uniformization theorem states that every simply connected Riemann surface is conformally equivalent to one of three Riemann surfaces: the open unit disk, the complex plane, or the Riemann sphere. The theorem is a generalization of the Riemann mapping theorem from simply connected open subsets of the plane to arbitrary simply connected Riemann surfaces.
In the mathematical fields of differential geometry and geometric analysis, the Ricci flow, sometimes also referred to as Hamilton's Ricci flow, is a certain partial differential equation for a Riemannian metric. It is often said to be analogous to the diffusion of heat and the heat equation, due to formal similarities in the mathematical structure of the equation. However, it is nonlinear and exhibits many phenomena not present in the study of the heat equation.
Shing-Tung Yau is a Chinese-American mathematician. He is the director of the Yau Mathematical Sciences Center at Tsinghua University and professor emeritus at Harvard University. Until 2022, Yau was the William Caspar Graustein Professor of Mathematics at Harvard, at which point he moved to Tsinghua.
In the mathematical field of differential geometry, Ricci-flatness is a condition on the curvature of a Riemannian manifold. Ricci-flat manifolds are a special kind of Einstein manifold. In theoretical physics, Ricci-flat Lorentzian manifolds are of fundamental interest, as they are the solutions of Einstein's field equations in a vacuum with vanishing cosmological constant.
Richard Streit Hamilton was an American mathematician who served as the Davies Professor of Mathematics at Columbia University.
Mikhael Leonidovich Gromov is a Russian-French mathematician known for his work in geometry, analysis and group theory. He is a permanent member of Institut des Hautes Études Scientifiques in France and a professor of mathematics at New York University.
Shiu-Yuen Cheng (鄭紹遠) is a Hong Kong mathematician. He is currently the Chair Professor of Mathematics at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. Cheng received his Ph.D. in 1974, under the supervision of Shiing-Shen Chern, from University of California at Berkeley. Cheng then spent some years as a post-doctoral fellow and assistant professor at Princeton University and the State University of New York at Stony Brook. Then he became a full professor at University of California at Los Angeles. Cheng chaired the Mathematics departments of both the Chinese University of Hong Kong and the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology in the 1990s. In 2004, he became the Dean of Science at HKUST. In 2012, he became a fellow of the American Mathematical Society.
Geometric analysis is a mathematical discipline where tools from differential equations, especially elliptic partial differential equations (PDEs), are used to establish new results in differential geometry and differential topology. The use of linear elliptic PDEs dates at least as far back as Hodge theory. More recently, it refers largely to the use of nonlinear partial differential equations to study geometric and topological properties of spaces, such as submanifolds of Euclidean space, Riemannian manifolds, and symplectic manifolds. This approach dates back to the work by Tibor Radó and Jesse Douglas on minimal surfaces, John Forbes Nash Jr. on isometric embeddings of Riemannian manifolds into Euclidean space, work by Louis Nirenberg on the Minkowski problem and the Weyl problem, and work by Aleksandr Danilovich Aleksandrov and Aleksei Pogorelov on convex hypersurfaces. In the 1980s fundamental contributions by Karen Uhlenbeck, Clifford Taubes, Shing-Tung Yau, Richard Schoen, and Richard Hamilton launched a particularly exciting and productive era of geometric analysis that continues to this day. A celebrated achievement was the solution to the Poincaré conjecture by Grigori Perelman, completing a program initiated and largely carried out by Richard Hamilton.
Marcel Berger was a French mathematician, doyen of French differential geometry, and a former director of the Institut des Hautes Études Scientifiques (IHÉS), France.
In mathematics—specifically, in Riemannian geometry—a Wiedersehen pair is a pair of distinct points x and y on a (usually, but not necessarily, two-dimensional) compact Riemannian manifold (M, g) such that every geodesic through x also passes through y, and the same with x and y interchanged.
In mathematics, Berger's isoembolic inequality is a result in Riemannian geometry that gives a lower bound on the volume of a Riemannian manifold and also gives a necessary and sufficient condition for the manifold to be isometric to the m-dimensional sphere with its usual "round" metric. The theorem is named after the mathematician Marcel Berger, who derived it from an inequality proved by Jerry Kazdan.
Jerry Lawrence Kazdan is an American mathematician noted for his work in differential geometry and the study of partial differential equations. His contributions include the Berger–Kazdan comparison theorem, which was a key step in the proof of the Blaschke conjecture and the classification of Wiedersehen manifolds. His best-known work, done in collaboration with Frank Warner, dealt with the problem of prescribing the scalar curvature of a Riemannian metric.
Leon Melvyn Simon, born in 1945, is a Leroy P. Steele Prize and Bôcher Prize-winning mathematician, known for deep contributions to the fields of geometric analysis, geometric measure theory, and partial differential equations. He is currently Professor Emeritus in the Mathematics Department at Stanford University.
Spectral geometry is a field in mathematics which concerns relationships between geometric structures of manifolds and spectra of canonically defined differential operators. The case of the Laplace–Beltrami operator on a closed Riemannian manifold has been most intensively studied, although other Laplace operators in differential geometry have also been examined. The field concerns itself with two kinds of questions: direct problems and inverse problems.
In Riemannian geometry, Cheng's eigenvalue comparison theorem states in general terms that when a domain is large, the first Dirichlet eigenvalue of its Laplace–Beltrami operator is small. This general characterization is not precise, in part because the notion of "size" of the domain must also account for its curvature. The theorem is due to Cheng (1975b) by Shiu-Yuen Cheng. Using geodesic balls, it can be generalized to certain tubular domains.
Gerhard Huisken is a German mathematician whose research concerns differential geometry and partial differential equations. He is known for foundational contributions to the theory of the mean curvature flow, including Huisken's monotonicity formula, which is named after him. With Tom Ilmanen, he proved a version of the Riemannian Penrose inequality, which is a special case of the more general Penrose conjecture in general relativity.
Joel Spruck is a mathematician, J. J. Sylvester Professor of Mathematics at Johns Hopkins University, whose research concerns geometric analysis and elliptic partial differential equations. He obtained his PhD from Stanford University with the supervision of Robert S. Finn in 1971.
Frank Wilson Warner III is an American mathematician, specializing in differential geometry.