Ends of negatively curved surfaces in Euclidean space (Q2268169)

The articles presents an almost complete classification of complete surfaces of negative Gaussian curvature in \(\mathbb{R}^3\) with respect to the genus \(g\), the number \(n_b\) of bowl ends (``widening ends''), and number \(n_c\) of cusp ends (``shrinking ends'' with belts of arbitrarily short lengths). It is shown that negatively curved \(C^\infty\) surfaces exist to the following data: 1) \(n_c\), \(g \in \mathbb{N} \cup \{0\}\) and \(n_b \in \mathbb{N}\), 2) \(n_c\), \(n_b\), \(g \in \mathbb{N} \cup \{0, \infty\}\) with at least one of these numbers being \(\infty\), Constructive arguments and surface surgery play an important role in the presentation. Accordingly, the article contains a lot of explicit examples or counter-examples and interesting images. The perhaps most interesting example is a family of negatively curved \(C^\infty\) surfaces of Euler characteristic \(1\) with only one bowl end such that the set of its points at infinity has nonempty interior. Even the extreme case where all points at infinity are attained is possible.