A combinatorial Yamabe problem on two and three dimensional manifolds

Abstract

In this paper, we introduce a new combinatorial curvature on two and three dimensional triangulated manifolds, which transforms in the same way as that of the smooth scalar curvature under scaling of the metric and could be used to approximate the Gauss curvature on two dimensional manifolds. Then we use the flow method to study the corresponding constant curvature problem, which is called combinatorial Yamabe problem.