The conformal geometry of surfaces recently developed by the authors leads to a unified understanding of algebraic curve theory and the geometry of surfaces on the basis of a quaternionic-valued function theory. The book offers an elementary introduction to the subject but takes the reader to rather advanced topics. Willmore surfaces in the foursphere, their Bäcklund and Darboux transforms are covered, and a new proof of the classification of Willmore spheres is given.

All papers appearing in this volume are original research articles and have not been published elsewhere. They meet the requirements that are necessary for publication in a good quality primary journal. E.Belchev, S.Hineva: On the minimal hypersurfaces of a locally symmetric manifold. -N.Blasic, N.Bokan, P.Gilkey: The spectral geometry of the Laplacian and the conformal Laplacian for manifolds with boundary. -J.Bolton, W.M.Oxbury, L.Vrancken, L.M. Woodward: Minimal immersions of RP2 into CPn. -W.Cieslak, A. Miernowski, W.Mozgawa: Isoptics of a strictly convex curve. -F.Dillen, L.Vrancken: Generalized Cayley surfaces. -A.Ferrandez, O.J.Garay, P.Lucas: On a certain class of conformally flat Euclidean hypersurfaces. -P.Gauduchon: Self-dual manifolds with non-negative Ricci operator. -B.Hajduk: On the obstruction group toexistence of Riemannian metrics of positive scalar curvature. -U.Hammenstaedt: Compact manifolds with 1/4-pinched negative curvature. -J.Jost, Xiaowei Peng: The geometry of moduli spaces of stable vector bundles over Riemannian surfaces. - O.Kowalski, F.Tricerri: A canonical connection for locally homogeneous Riemannian manifolds. -M.Kozlowski: Some improper affine spheres in A3. -R.Kusner: A maximum principle at infinity and the topology of complete embedded surfaces with constant mean curvature. -Anmin Li: Affine completeness and Euclidean completeness. -U.Lumiste: On submanifolds with parallel higher order fundamental form in Euclidean spaces. -A.Martinez, F.Milan: Convex affine surfaces with constant affine mean curvature. -M.Min-Oo, E.A.Ruh, P.Tondeur: Transversal curvature and tautness for Riemannian foliations. -S.Montiel, A.Ros: Schroedinger operators associated to a holomorphic map. -D.Motreanu: Generic existence of Morse functions on infinite dimensional Riemannian manifolds and applications. -B.Opozda: Some extensions of Radon's theorem.

The contributions in this volume summarize parts of a seminar on conformal geometry which was held at the Max-Planck-Institut fur Mathematik in Bonn during the academic year 1985/86. The intention of this seminar was to study conformal structures on mani folds from various viewpoints. The motivation to publish seminar notes grew out of the fact that in spite of the basic importance of this field to many topics of current interest (low-dimensional topology, analysis on manifolds . . . ) there seems to be no coherent introduction to conformal geometry in the literature. We have tried to make the material presented in this book self-contained, so it should be accessible to students with some background in differential geometry. Moreover, we hope that it will be useful as a reference and as a source of inspiration for further research. Ravi Kulkarni/Ulrich Pinkall Conformal Structures and Mobius Structures Ravi S. Kulkarni* Contents 0 Introduction 2 1 Conformal Structures 4 2 Conformal Change of a Metric, Mobius Structures 8 3 Liouville's Theorem 12 n 4 The GroupsM(n) andM(E ) 13 5 Connection with Hyperbol ic Geometry 16 6 Constructions of Mobius Manifolds 21 7 Development and Holonomy 31 8 Ideal Boundary, Classification of Mobius Structures 35 * Partially supported by the Max-Planck-Institut fur Mathematik, Bonn, and an NSF grant. 2 O Introduction (0. 1) Historically, the stereographic projection and the Mercator projection must have appeared to mathematicians very startling."

This open access book covers the main topics for a course on the differential geometry of curves and surfaces. Unlike the common approach in existing textbooks, there is a strong focus on variational problems, ranging from elastic curves to surfaces that minimize area, or the Willmore functional. Moreover, emphasis is given on topics that are useful for applications in science and computer graphics. Most often these applications are concerned with finding the shape of a curve or a surface that minimizes physically meaningful energy. Manifolds are not introduced as such, but the presented approach provides preparation and motivation for a follow-up course on manifolds, and topics like the Gauss-Bonnet theorem for compact surfaces are covered.