Liouville equation and Schottky problem (Q1899843)

The famous Novikov conjecture, proved in the 1980s by several people (Dubrovin, Arbarello-De Concini, Shiota, Mulase) in different ways and degrees of completeness, states that Jacobians of compact Riemann surfaces are characterized by the KP hierarchy satisfied by the theta constants associated with their period matrices. This provided, simultaneously, an analytic solution of the long-standing Riemann-Schottky problem of characterizing Jacobians by means of their ``theta-nullwerte''. In the present paper, one of the approaches to the Novikov conjecture, namely that one of Krichever-Novikov-Dubrovin, is linked to an ``ansatz'' which combines the uniformization theory of Riemann surfaces (via Fuchsian groups), the Liouville partial differential equation, and the analysis of the KP hierarchy. This ``ansatz'' reflects the fact that the Liouville equation is uniquely satisfied by the Poincaré metric on a Riemann surface, and at least for genera \(g \geq 4\) this leads to nontrivial relations among the holomorphic differentials on the surface, which in turn are related to Hirota's formulation of the KP hierarchy and the hyperbolic geometry of the corresponding Teichmüller spaces of (marked) Riemann surfaces. The mathematical significance of the author's observations and calculations is enhanced by the fact that, as for applications in physics, this ``ansatz'' provides explicit expressions for correlators in string theory and in 2D-quantum gravity. This is discussed in another paper by the authors [cf. ``Uniformization theory and 2D gravity. I. Liouville action and intersection numbers'', Int. J. Mod. Phys. A 10, No. 3, 289 (1995)].