Differential geometry is a mathematical discipline that studies the geometry of smooth shapes and smooth spaces, otherwise known as smooth manifolds. It uses the techniques of differential calculus, integral calculus, linear algebra and multilinear algebra. The field has its origins in the study of spherical geometry as far back as antiquity. It also relates to astronomy, the geodesy of the Earth, and later the study of hyperbolic geometry by Lobachevsky. The simplest examples of smooth spaces are the plane and space curves and surfaces in the three-dimensional Euclidean space, and the study of these shapes formed the basis for development of modern differential geometry during the 18th and 19th centuries.
In the mathematical field of geometric topology, the Poincaré conjecture is a theorem about the characterization of the 3-sphere, which is the hypersphere that bounds the unit ball in four-dimensional space.
In mathematics, particularly in complex analysis, a Riemann surface is a one-dimensional complex manifold.
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 differential geometry, the Ricci curvature tensor, named after Gregorio Ricci-Curbastro, is a geometric object which is determined by a choice of Riemannian or pseudo-Riemannian metric on a manifold. It can be considered, broadly, as a measure of the degree to which the geometry of a given metric tensor differs locally from that of ordinary Euclidean space or pseudo-Euclidean space.
In the mathematical field of Riemannian geometry, the scalar curvature is a measure of the curvature of a Riemannian manifold. To each point on a Riemannian manifold, it assigns a single real number determined by the geometry of the metric near that point. It is defined by a complicated explicit formula in terms of partial derivatives of the metric components, although it is also characterized by the volume of infinitesimally small geodesic balls. In the context of the differential geometry of surfaces, the scalar curvature is twice the Gaussian curvature, and completely characterizes the curvature of a surface. In higher dimensions, however, the scalar curvature only represents one particular part of the Riemann curvature tensor.
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 he was the William Caspar Graustein Professor of Mathematics at Harvard, at which point he moved to Tsinghua.
In mathematics, the Chern theorem states that the Euler–Poincaré characteristic of a closed even-dimensional Riemannian manifold is equal to the integral of a certain polynomial of its curvature form.
In mathematics, low-dimensional topology is the branch of topology that studies manifolds, or more generally topological spaces, of four or fewer dimensions. Representative topics are the structure theory of 3-manifolds and 4-manifolds, knot theory, and braid groups. This can be regarded as a part of geometric topology. It may also be used to refer to the study of topological spaces of dimension 1, though this is more typically considered part of continuum theory.
In the mathematical field of differential geometry, Ricci-flatness is a condition on the curvature of a (pseudo-)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 is an American mathematician who serves as the Davies Professor of Mathematics at Columbia University. He is known for contributions to geometric analysis and partial differential equations. Hamilton is best known for foundational contributions to the theory of the Ricci flow and the development of a corresponding program of techniques and ideas for resolving the Poincaré conjecture and geometrization conjecture in the field of geometric topology. Grigori Perelman built upon Hamilton's results to prove the conjectures, and was awarded a Millennium Prize for his work. However, Perelman declined the award, regarding Hamilton's contribution as being equal to his own.
In differential geometry, the Weyl curvature tensor, named after Hermann Weyl, is a measure of the curvature of spacetime or, more generally, a pseudo-Riemannian manifold. Like the Riemann curvature tensor, the Weyl tensor expresses the tidal force that a body feels when moving along a geodesic. The Weyl tensor differs from the Riemann curvature tensor in that it does not convey information on how the volume of the body changes, but rather only how the shape of the body is distorted by the tidal force. The Ricci curvature, or trace component of the Riemann tensor contains precisely the information about how volumes change in the presence of tidal forces, so the Weyl tensor is the traceless component of the Riemann tensor. This tensor has the same symmetries as the Riemann tensor, but satisfies the extra condition that it is trace-free: metric contraction on any pair of indices yields zero. It is obtained from the Riemann tensor by subtracting a tensor that is a linear expression in the Ricci tensor.
Richard Melvin Schoen is an American mathematician known for his work in differential geometry and geometric analysis. He is best known for the resolution of the Yamabe problem in 1984.
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.
In the mathematical field of differential geometry, the existence of isothermal coordinates for a (pseudo-)Riemannian metric is often of interest. In the case of a metric on a two-dimensional space, the existence of isothermal coordinates is unconditional. For higher-dimensional spaces, the Weyl–Schouten theorem characterizes the existence of isothermal coordinates by certain equations to be satisfied by the Riemann curvature tensor of the metric.
In mathematics, specifically in differential geometry, isothermal coordinates on a Riemannian manifold are local coordinates where the metric is conformal to the Euclidean metric. This means that in isothermal coordinates, the Riemannian metric locally has the form
In mathematics, the Schwarz alternating method or alternating process is an iterative method introduced in 1869–1870 by Hermann Schwarz in the theory of conformal mapping. Given two overlapping regions in the complex plane in each of which the Dirichlet problem could be solved, Schwarz described an iterative method for solving the Dirichlet problem in their union, provided their intersection was suitably well behaved. This was one of several constructive techniques of conformal mapping developed by Schwarz as a contribution to the problem of uniformization, posed by Riemann in the 1850s and first resolved rigorously by Koebe and Poincaré in 1907. It furnished a scheme for uniformizing the union of two regions knowing how to uniformize each of them separately, provided their intersection was topologically a disk or an annulus. From 1870 onwards Carl Neumann also contributed to this theory.
In mathematics, a planar Riemann surface is a Riemann surface sharing the topological properties of a connected open subset of the Riemann sphere. They are characterized by the topological property that the complement of every closed Jordan curve in the Riemann surface has two connected components. An equivalent characterization is the differential geometric property that every closed differential 1-form of compact support is exact. Every simply connected Riemann surface is planar. The class of planar Riemann surfaces was studied by Koebe who proved in 1910, as a generalization of the uniformization theorem, that every such surface is conformally equivalent to either the Riemann sphere or the complex plane with slits parallel to the real axis removed.
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