Publisher's Synopsis
This book contains the proceedings of the international conference in "Differential Geometry" which was held at the Instituto de Matematica Pura e Aplicada, Brazil in August of 1988.;The papers contained in this volume cover a broad spectrum of topics and taken together represent the current state of the subject. Topics covered include: the families index theorem for manifolds with boundary, harmonic mappings and group representations, eigenvalues of the laplacian on locally symmetric spaces, metrics of constant scalar curvature in a given conformal class, the isoperimetric problem, intrinsic geometric generalizations of the wave and sine-gordon Equations, Chow varieties and group actions on algebraic spaces, the "chopping" of Riemannian manifolds with applications to the theory of characteristic numbers of open manifolds, and the geometric theory of subharmonic functions.;There are many papers concerned with submanifold theory and, in particular, the theory of minimal varieties. These articles range from the study of classical minimal surfaces to the modern theory of integral currents. There are also articles oriented towards applications of differential geometry covering such topics as non-linear control theory and crystalline geometry. This book should be of importance to graduate students, researchers and professional mathematicians working in the field of differential equations and geometry.
