Minimal surfaces: a derivation of the minimal surface equation for an arbitrary \(C^2\) coordinate chart (Q1407433)

The author derives the minimal surface equation for an arbitrary \( C^2\) coordinate chart \( \phi (x,y)=( \phi _1 (x,y), \phi _2 (x,y), \phi _3 (x,y)) \), \(\phi : R\rightarrow \mathbb R^3\), where \(R\) is a bounded open set in \( \mathbb R^2 \). Let \( S=\phi (R)\) be a surface in \( \mathbb R^3\). Then she proves the following Theorem. Let \(\phi : R\rightarrow \mathbb R^3\) be a one-to-one, \(C^2\), vector-valued function such that \( S=\phi (R)\) is area-minimizing. Then \( \phi \) satisfies the differential equation \[ \biggl({\phi _y \times ( \phi _x\times \phi _y) \over \| \phi _x\times \phi _y \| } \biggr) _x + \biggl({\phi _x \times ( \phi _y\times \phi _x) \over \| \phi _x\times \phi _y \| } \biggr) _y =0, \] where \( \parallel \) \( \parallel \) denotes the Euclidean norm. This result also can be found on p. 80 of the book of \textit{O. Bolza} [Vorlesungen über Variationsrechnung, Leipzig (1933; Zbl 0007.21202)]. There are two cases of interest. First, let \(S\) be the graph of a \(C^2\) function \(f=f(x,y)\). In the second case \(S\) is given by an isothermic representation. In both cases the author shows that the above differential equation is equivalent to the well-known characterizations of minimal surfaces. The above differential equation may be understood as a way to check (for instance by means of computer-algebraic methods) whether a surface given in arbitrary coordinates satisfies the necessary condition \( H=0 \) for area-minimizing or not, where \(H\) denotes the mean curvature of the surface.