This book describes very recent results involving an extensive use of analytical tools in the study of geometrical and topological properties of complete Riemannian manifolds. It analyzes in detail an extension of the Bochner technique to the non compact setting, yielding conditions which ensure that solutions of geometrically significant differential equations either are trivial (vanishing results) or give rise to finite dimensional vector spaces (finiteness results). The book develops a range of methods, from spectral theory and qualitative properties of solutions of PDEs, to comparison...

The aim of this monograph is to present a self-contained introduction to some geometric and analytic aspects of the Yamabe problem. The book also describes a wide range of methods and techniques that can be successfully applied to nonlinear differential equations in particularly challenging situations. Such situations occur where the lack of compactness, symmetry and homogeneity prevents the use of more standard tools typically used in compact situations or for the Euclidean setting. The work is written in an easy style that makes it accessible even to non-specialists.

After a...