Bourbaki Seminar 1081 : Min-max methods and the Willmore conjecture, after Fernando Codá Marques and André Arroja Neves

Two years ago, F.C. Marques and A.A. Neves implemented, in the framework of closed rectifiable 2-dimensional currents of the 3-dimensional sphere, a min-max method in geometric measure theory due to F. Almgren and J. Pitts. Using this approach they succeeded in proving that the famous Clifford torus minimizes the area among all closed minimal surfaces of non-zero genus in $S^3$. Another spectacular consequence of their work is to provide a proof of the Willmore conjecture. The goal of this talk is to discuss first the general framework of these two theorems of Marques and Neves. We shall then present the structures and some key details of their proofs. We will then address the scope of this remarkable contribution to the calculus of variations on surfaces in a 3-dimensional space.

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