23 Jan 2001

Marius Overholt "Uniformization".

A series of lectures devoted to uniformization theory and characteristic classes. First lecture is a brief and elementary survey of uniformization. Starting from an idea in analytic geometry, we discuss elliptic functions and the Uniformization Theorem of Koebe and Poincare, which is one of the summits of complex analysis. But this theorem can also be formulated as a result in differential geometry, and we discuss this as a motivation for subsequent developments in higher dimensions.