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Concept
Ricci flow
Summary
In the mathematical fields of differential geometry and geometric analysis, the Ricci flow (ˈriːtʃi , ˈrittʃi), 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.
The Ricci flow, so named for the presence of the Ricci tensor in its definition, was introduced by Richard Hamilton, who used it through the 1980s to prove striking new results in Riemannian geometry. Later extensions of Hamilton's methods by various authors resulted in new applications to geometry, including the resolution of the differentiable sphere conjecture by Simon Brendle and Richard Schoen.
Following Shing-Tung Yau's suggestion that the singularities of solutions of the Ricci flow could identify the topological data predicted by William Thurston's geometrization conjecture, Hamilton produced a number of results in the 1990s which were directed towards the conjecture's resolution. In 2002 and 2003, Grigori Perelman presented a number of fundamental new results about the Ricci flow, including a novel variant of some technical aspects of Hamilton's program. Hamilton and Perelman's works are now widely regarded as forming a proof of the Thurston conjecture, including as a special case the Poincaré conjecture, which had been a well-known open problem in the field of geometric topology since 1904. Their results are considered as a milestone in the fields of geometry and topology.
On a smooth manifold M, a smooth Riemannian metric g automatically determines the Ricci tensor Ricg. For each element p of M, by definition gp is a positive-definite inner product on the tangent space TpM at p. If given a one-parameter family of Riemannian metrics gt, one may then consider the derivative ∂/∂t gt, which then assigns to each particular value of t and p a symmetric bilinear form on TpM.
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Ontological neighbourhood
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Shing-Tung Yau
Shing-Tung Yau (jaʊ; ; born April 4, 1949) is a Chinese-American mathematician and the William Caspar Graustein Professor of Mathematics at Harvard University. In April 2022, Yau announced retirement from Harvard to become Chair Professor of mathematics at Tsinghua University. Yau was born in Shantou, China, moved to Hong Kong at a young age, and to the United States in 1969. He was awarded the Fields Medal in 1982, in recognition of his contributions to partial differential equations, the Calabi conjecture, the positive energy theorem, and the Monge–Ampère equation.
Differential geometry of surfaces
In mathematics, the differential geometry of surfaces deals with the differential geometry of smooth surfaces with various additional structures, most often, a Riemannian metric. Surfaces have been extensively studied from various perspectives: extrinsically, relating to their embedding in Euclidean space and intrinsically, reflecting their properties determined solely by the distance within the surface as measured along curves on the surface.
Geometric analysis
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.