Geometry And Topology Of Submanifolds, Iii: Proceedings Of The Leeds Differential Geometry Workshop 1990

Book excerpt: This workshop collected together works by experts working in various aspects of the differential geometry of submanifold and discussed recent advances and unsolved problems. Two important linking lectures were on the work done by Thorbergsson and others on classifying isoparametric submanifolds of Euclidean spaces and the generalisation of these to Hilbert spaces due to Terng and others. Isoparametric submanifolds provides examples of minimal, taut submanifolds, of harmonic maps and submanifolds with parallel second fundamental form-all topics discussed at this workshop. There were also lectures on the rapidly developing topic of the affine geometry of hypersurfaces and on applications. Amomg the applications discussed are new methods for using PDE's for generating surfaces with special shapes for use in engineering design.