Paper 4, Section II, I

Differential Geometry | Part II, 2020

(a) State the Gauss-Bonnet theorem for compact regular surfaces S⊂R3S \subset \mathbb{R}^{3} without boundary. Identify all expressions occurring in any formulae.

(b) Let S⊂R3S \subset \mathbb{R}^{3} be a compact regular surface without boundary and suppose that its Gaussian curvature K(x)⩾0K(x) \geqslant 0 for all x∈Sx \in S. Show that SS is diffeomorphic to the sphere.

Let SnS_{n} be a sequence of compact regular surfaces in R3\mathbb{R}^{3} and let Kn(x)K_{n}(x) denote the Gaussian curvature of SnS_{n} at x∈Snx \in S_{n}. Suppose that

lim sup⁡n→∞inf⁡x∈SnKn(x)⩾0\limsup _{n \rightarrow \infty} \inf _{x \in S_{n}} K_{n}(x) \geqslant 0

(c) Give an example to show that it does not follow that for all sufficiently large nn the surface SnS_{n} is diffeomorphic to the sphere.

(d) Now assume, in addition to (⋆)(\star), that all of the following conditions hold:

(1) There exists a constant R<∞R<\infty such that for all n,Snn, S_{n} is contained in a ball of radius RR around the origin.

(2) There exists a constant M<∞M<\infty such that Area⁡(Sn)⩽M\operatorname{Area}\left(S_{n}\right) \leqslant M for all nn.

(3) There exists a constant ϵ0>0\epsilon_{0}>0 such that for all nn, all points p∈Snp \in S_{n} admit a geodesic polar coordinate system centred at pp of radius at least ϵ0\epsilon_{0}.

(4) There exists a constant C<∞C<\infty such that on all such geodesic polar neighbourhoods, ∣∂rKn∣⩽C\left|\partial_{r} K_{n}\right| \leqslant C for all nn, where rr denotes a geodesic polar coordinate.

(i) Show that for all sufficiently large nn, the surface SnS_{n} is diffeomorphic to the sphere. [Hint: It may be useful to identify a geodesic polar ball B(pn,ϵ0)B\left(p_{n}, \epsilon_{0}\right) in each SnS_{n} for which ∫B(pn,ϵ0)KndA\int_{B\left(p_{n}, \epsilon_{0}\right)} K_{n} d A is bounded below by a positive constant independent of nn.]

(ii) Explain how your example from (c) fails to satisfy one or more of these extra conditions (1)-(4).

[You may use without proof the standard computations for geodesic polar coordinates: E=1,F=0,lim⁡r→0G(r,θ)=0,lim⁡r→0(G)r(r,θ)=1E=1, F=0, \lim _{r \rightarrow 0} G(r, \theta)=0, \lim _{r \rightarrow 0}(\sqrt{G})_{r}(r, \theta)=1, and (G)rr=−KG.]\left.(\sqrt{G})_{r r}=-K \sqrt{G} .\right]

Typos? Please submit corrections to this page on GitHub.