The Conjecture claims that any convex, closed and sufficiently smooth surface in three dimensionalEuclidean space needs to admit at least two umbilic points. In the sense of the Conjecture, the spheroid with only two umbilic points and the sphere, all points of which are umbilic, are examples of surfaces with minimal and maximal numbers of the umbilicus. For the conjecture to be well posed, or the umbilic points to be well-defined, the surface needs to be at least twice differentiable.
While this book goes into print, Mr. Cohn-Vossen has succeeded in proving that closed real-analytic surfaces do not have umbilic points of index > 2. This proves the conjecture of Carathéodory for such surfaces, namely that they need to have at least two umbilics.
Here Blaschke's index is twice the usual definition for an index of an umbilic point, and the global conjecture follows by the Poincaré–Hopf index theorem. No paper was submitted by Cohn-Vossen to the proceedings of the International Congress, while in later editions of Blaschke's book the above comments were removed. It is, therefore, reasonable to assume that this work was inconclusive. For analytic surfaces, an affirmative answer to this conjecture was given in 1940 by Hans Hamburger in a long paper published in three parts. The approach of Hamburger was also via a local index estimate for isolated umbilics, which he had shown to imply the Conjecture in his earlier work. In 1943, a shorter proof was proposed by Gerrit Bol, see also, but, in 1959, Tilla Klotz found and corrected a gap in Bol's proof in. Her proof, in turn, was announced to be incomplete in Hanspeter Scherbel's dissertation. Among other publications we refer to papers. All the proofs mentioned above are based on Hamburger's reduction of the Carathéodory conjecture to the following conjecture: the index of every isolated umbilic point is never greater than one. Roughly speaking, the main difficulty lies in the resolution of singularities generated by umbilical points. All the above-mentioned authors resolve the singularities by induction on 'degree of degeneracy' of the umbilical point, but none of them was able to present the induction process clearly. In 2002, Vladimir Ivanov revisited the work of Hamburger on analytic surfaces with the following stated intent: "First, considering analytic surfaces, we assert with full responsibility that Carathéodory was right. Second, we know how this can be proved rigorously. Third, we intend to exhibit here a proof which, in our opinion, will convince every reader who is really ready to undertake a long and tiring journey with us." First he follows the way passed by Gerrit Bol and Tilla Klotz, but later he proposes his own way for singularity resolution where crucial role belongs tocomplex analysis.
Mathematical research on the original global conjecture for smooth surfaces
In 2008, Guilfoyle and Klingenberg announced a proof of the global conjecture for surfaces of smoothness. Their method uses neutral Kähler geometry of the Klein quadric, Mean curvature flow, the Riemann–Roch index theorem, and the Sard–Smale theorem on regular values of Fredholm operators. While the complete proof has not been published as of May 2020, the section establishing the required interior estimates for higher codimensional mean curvature flow in an indefinite geometry has appeared in print. In 2012, Mohammad Ghomi and Ralph Howard showed, using a Möbius transformation, that the global conjecture for surfaces of smoothness C2 can be reformulated in terms of the number of umbilic points on graphs subject to certain asymptotics of the gradient.
