No label defined (Q4526536)

An extended summary of the author's course during the Summer School on Differential Geometry in Coimbra, 1999, is given. The purpose of the course was to exhibit the use of quaternionic methods in conformal surface theory as a sample for advanced studies in the geometry of submanifolds. Topics handled by the author are an introduction to the linear algebra over the quaternions, including projective spaces and vector bundles, mean curvature spheres, Willmore surfaces, some aspects of metric and affine conformal geometry, twistor projections, Bäcklund transformations and the special cases that the three-sphere and quaternionic projective 1-space are the ambient spaces. A detailed and extended exposition of the subject will be found in a joint paper by Francis Burstall, Dirk Ferus, Katrin Leschke, Franz Pedit and Ulrich Pinkall [Conformal geometry of surfaces in \(S^4\) and quaternions (to appear)]. For the entire collection see [Zbl 0942.00032].