Simplicial energy and simplicial harmonic maps (Q906886)

The energy of a map from one manifold to another is a measure of the total stretching of the map. Energy minimizing harmonic maps have found numerous applications in geometry, analysis, algebra and topology. In this paper the authors introduce a new type of energy that leads to what they call a simplicial harmonic map. Their idea is to give a new, more combinatorial, definition of area, and then to find a corresponding definition for energy. The payoff is that the existence and regularity of simplicial harmonic maps are simple to prove, but they retain enough of the features of smooth harmonic maps to be useful in applications. At the end they have shown that some important applications of smooth harmonic maps can be obtained in this direction. The paper focuses on maps from surfaces into non-positively curved manifolds and spaces. One motivation for studying energy from a more combinatorial point of view is to obtain numerical methods for computing minimal and harmonic surfaces. This was carried out in the work of \textit{U. Pinkall} and \textit{K. Polthier} [Exp. Math. 2, No. 1, 15--36 (1993; Zbl 0799.53008)]. See [\textit{K. Polthier}, Computational Aspects of Discrete Minimal Surfaces, Clay Mathematics Proceedings 2, 65--111 (2005; Zbl 1100.53014)] for a survey of related work. The discrete harmonic maps of Pinkall and Polthier are maps of a triangulation of a domain surface into \(\mathbb R^n\) that are linear on each 2-simplex. Their formula gives the natural energy for a piecewise-linear approximation of a smooth map, and has found many uses in computational geometry, cf. [\textit{M. Desbrun} et al., Implicit fairing of irregular meshes using diffusion and curvature flow, Proceedings of the 26th annual conference on Computer graphics and interactive techniques, 317--324 (1999)], where harmonic maps give a preferred choice of surface map for purposes such as texturing and meshing. While the Pinkall-Polthier harmonic maps retain many of the useful features of smooth harmonic maps, particularly when the 2-simplices in the domain are acute angled, they do not in general satisfy the convex hull or mean value properties. The paper is a pleasure to read, being both carefully researched and explained.