Discrete Yamabe problem for polyhedral surfaces (Q6156089)

The Yamabe problem asks whether every closed Riemannian manifold is conformally equivalent to one with constant scalar curvature. For 2-dimensional manifolds the scalar and the Gaussian curvature are equivalent, and thus the Yamabe problem is answered by the Poincaré-Koebe uniformization theorem, which states that any closed oriented Riemannian surface is conformally equivalent to one with constant Gaussian curvature. The discrete Yamabe problem asks whether for every PL-metric there exists a discrete conformally equivalent one with constant discrete Gaussian curvature. The main result of the paper is that for every PL-metric \(d\) on a marked surface \((S, V)\), there exists a discrete conformally equivalent PL-metric \(\widetilde{d}\) such that the piecewise flat surface \((S,V,\widetilde{d})\) has constant discrete Gaussian curvature. The author uses the following notation. A piecewise flat surface is a triple \((S,V,d)\), where \(S\) is the underlying topological surface, \(d\) denotes a piecewise linear metric (PL-metric, for short), and \(V\subset S\) is a finite set containing the conical singularities of \(d\). The cone angle at a point \(i\in V\) is denoted by \(\alpha_i\), and the angle defect \(2\pi-\alpha_i\) is denoted by \(W_i\). The discrete Gaussian curvature at a point \(i\in V\) is defined as the quotient of the angle defect \(W_i\) and the area \(A_i\) of the Voronoi cell of \(i\) and is denoted by \(K_i\), i.e., \(K_i=W_i/A_i\). The Voronoi cell of a point \(i\in V\) consists of all points on the piecewise flat surface \((S,V,d)\) that are as close or closer to \(i\) than to any other point in \(V\). Two PL-metrics on a surface with a fixed triangulation are discrete conformally equivalent if their edge lengths \(\ell, \widetilde{\ell}: E\to \mathbb{R}_{>0}\) are related by the conformal factor \(u:V\to\mathbb{R}\) according to the formula \(\widetilde{\ell}_{ij} = \ell_{ij}\exp(\frac12 u_i + \frac12 u_j)\), which is a straightforward discretization of the conformal equivalence of smooth surfaces. \par The proof is variational in nature. The author translates the problem into a non-convex optimization problem with inequality constraints, and solves the latter using a classical theorem from calculus. She also provides explicit examples to show that the PL-metric \(\widetilde{d}\) of constant curvature is, in general, not unique.