Yau's conjecture

Last updated

In differential geometry, Yau's conjecture is a mathematical conjecture which states that any closed Riemannian 3-manifold has an infinite number of smooth closed immersed minimal surfaces. It is named after Shing-Tung Yau, who posed it as the 88th entry in his 1982 list of open problems in differential geometry. [1]

The conjecture was resolved by Kei Irie, Fernando Codá Marques and André Neves in the generic case, [2] and by Antoine Song in full generality. [3]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Shing-Tung Yau</span> Chinese mathematician

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 the mathematical field of differential geometry, there are various splitting theorems on when a pseudo-Riemannian manifold can be given as a metric product. The best-known is the Cheeger–Gromoll splitting theorem for Riemannian manifolds, although there has also been research into splitting of Lorentzian manifolds.

In mathematics, the soul theorem is a theorem of Riemannian geometry that largely reduces the study of complete manifolds of non-negative sectional curvature to that of the compact case. Jeff Cheeger and Detlef Gromoll proved the theorem in 1972 by generalizing a 1969 result of Gromoll and Wolfgang Meyer. The related soul conjecture, formulated by Cheeger and Gromoll at that time, was proved twenty years later by Grigori Perelman.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Richard Schoen</span> American mathematician

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.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Shiu-Yuen Cheng</span> Hong Kong mathematician

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.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Geometric analysis</span> Field of higher mathematics

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.

The Oswald Veblen Prize in Geometry is an award granted by the American Mathematical Society for notable research in geometry or topology. It was funded in 1961 in memory of Oswald Veblen and first issued in 1964. The Veblen Prize is now worth US$5000, and is awarded every three years.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Willmore conjecture</span> Lower bound on the integrated squared mean curvature of a torus

In differential geometry, the Willmore conjecture is a lower bound on the Willmore energy of a torus. It is named after the English mathematician Tom Willmore, who conjectured it in 1965. A proof by Fernando Codá Marques and André Neves was announced in 2012 and published in 2014.

The Geometry Festival is an annual mathematics conference held in the United States.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Robert Osserman</span> American mathematician

Robert "Bob" Osserman was an American mathematician who worked in geometry. He is specially remembered for his work on the theory of minimal surfaces.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">H. Blaine Lawson</span> American mathematician

Herbert Blaine Lawson, Jr. is a mathematician best known for his work in minimal surfaces, calibrated geometry, and algebraic cycles. He is currently a Distinguished Professor of Mathematics at Stony Brook University. He received his PhD from Stanford University in 1969 for work carried out under the supervision of Robert Osserman.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Leon Simon</span> Australian mathematician (born 1945)

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.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Fernando Codá Marques</span> Brazilian mathematician

Fernando Codá dos Santos Cavalcanti Marques is a Brazilian mathematician working mainly in geometry, topology, partial differential equations and Morse theory. He is a professor at Princeton University. In 2012, together with André Neves, he proved the Willmore conjecture.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">André Neves</span> Portuguese mathematician (born 1975)

André da Silva Graça Arroja Neves is a Portuguese mathematician and a professor at the University of Chicago. He joined the faculty of the University of Chicago in 2016. In 2012, jointly with Fernando Codá Marques, he solved the Willmore conjecture.

In mathematics, the Almgren–Pitts min-max theory is an analogue of Morse theory for hypersurfaces.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">William Hamilton Meeks, III</span> American mathematician

William Hamilton Meeks III is an American mathematician, specializing in differential geometry and minimal surfaces.

In mathematics, Yau's conjecture on the first eigenvalue is, as of 2018, an unsolved conjecture proposed by Shing-Tung Yau in 1982. It asks:

Is it true that the first eigenvalue for the Laplace–Beltrami operator on an embedded minimal hypersurface of is ?

David Allen Hoffman is an American mathematician whose research concerns differential geometry. He is an adjunct professor at Stanford University. In 1985, together with William Meeks, he proved that Costa's surface was embedded. He is a fellow of the American Mathematical Society since 2018, for "contributions to differential geometry, particularly minimal surface theory, and for pioneering the use of computer graphics as an aid to research." He was awarded the Chauvenet Prize in 1990 for his expository article "The Computer-Aided Discovery of New Embedded Minimal Surfaces". He obtained his Ph.D. from Stanford University in 1971 under the supervision of Robert Osserman.

Antoine Song is a French mathematician whose research concerns differential geometry. In 2018, he proved Yau's conjecture. He is a Clay Research Fellow (2019–2024). He obtained his Ph.D. from Princeton University in 2019 under the supervision of Fernando Codá Marques.

In the mathematical field of differential geometry, a maximal surface is a certain kind of submanifold of a Lorentzian manifold. Precisely, given a Lorentzian manifold (M, g), a maximal surface is a spacelike submanifold of M whose mean curvature is zero. As such, maximal surfaces in Lorentzian geometry are directly analogous to minimal surfaces in Riemannian geometry. The difference in terminology between the two settings has to do with the fact that small regions in maximal surfaces are local maximizers of the area functional, while small regions in minimal surfaces are local minimizers of the area functional.

References

  1. Yau, Shing Tung (1982). "Problem section". In Yau, Shing-Tung (ed.). Seminar on Differential Geometry. Annals of Mathematics Studies. Vol. 102. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. pp. 669–706. doi:10.1515/9781400881918-035. ISBN   978-1-4008-8191-8. MR   0645762. Zbl   0479.53001.
  2. Irie, Kei; Marques, Fernando C.; Neves, André (2018). "Density of minimal hypersurfaces for generic metrics". Annals of Mathematics . 187 (3): 963–972. doi: 10.4007/annals.2018.187.3.8 .
  3. Song, Antoine (2023). "Existence of infinitely many minimal hypersurfaces in closed manifolds". Annals of Mathematics . 197 (3): 859–895. doi: 10.4007/annals.2023.197.3.1 .

Carlos Matheus (November 5, 2017). "Yau's conjecture of abundance of minimal hypersurfaces is generically true (in low dimensions)".