Conformal invariants and nonlinear elliptic equations

Abstract

We describe several “uniformizing” problems in conformal geometry, all of which can be formulated as problems of existence for solutions of certain elliptic partial differential equations. For the sake of exposition we divide the discussion according to the type of PDE, beginning with semilinear equations related to the scalar curvature, then higher order equations arising from the Q-curvature, and finally fully nonlinear equations.