Let M be a compact Criemannian manifold of nonpositive curvature1 and with fundamental group . It is well known [8, p. 102] that M is a K (, 1) and thus completely determined up to homotopy type by . In light of this fact it is natural to ask to what extent the riemannian structure of M is determined by the structure of , and the intent of this paper is to demonstrate that rather strong implications of this sort exist. In the case that M has strictly negative curvature, the group is known to be highly noncommutative. Every abelian, in fact, every solvable, subgroup of is cyclic [3]. It is therefore a plausible conjecture that in the nonpositive curvature case, will possess large amounts of commutativity only under special geometric circumstances. We shall show that this is true, that indeed those properties of which involve commutativity have a dramatic reflection in the riemannian structure of M.

It was in the early nineteen thirties that Douglas and Radd solved the Plateau problem for a rectifiable Jordan curve in Euclidean space. The minimal surfaces that they obtained are realized by conformal harmonic maps from the unit disk. In 1948 Morrey generalized the theorem of Douglas and Radd to minimal surfaces in a homogeneously regular Riemannian manifold. In both cases the solutions are defective as they may possess branch points. It was not until 1968 that Osserman [-24] was able to prove that interior branch points do not exist on the Douglas-Radd-Morrey solution.(Osserman's theorem in this full generality was proved by Alt [-2, 3] and Gulliver [8].) If the Jordan curve is real analytic, Gulliver and Lesley [9] showed that the solution surface is free of branch points even on its boundary. Hence, at least in this case, we know that the Douglas-Radd-Morrey solution is an immersion and represents a

Let M be a complete non-compact Riemannian manifold whose sectional curvature is bounded between two constants-k and K. Then one expects that the heat diffusion in such a manifold behaves like the heat diffusion in Euclidean space. The purpose of this paper is to give a justi-fication of such a statement.

Hence the energy defines a functional on the space of Lipshitz maps between M and M'. Critical points of this functional are called harmonic maps. These maps were studied by Bochner, Morrey, Rauch, Eells and Sampson, Hartman, Uhlenbeck, Hamilton, Hildebrandt and others. The first fundamental result was due to Eells and Sampson [3] who proved that, in case M'has non-positive sectional curvature, each map from M to M'is homotopic to a harmonic map.(This result was then extended by Hamilton [8] to the case where both M and M'are allowed to have boundary.) Later Hartman [7] was able to prove the harmonic map is unique in each homotopy class if M'has strictly negative curvature. This last result of Hartman leads one to believe that harmonic maps between compact manifolds with negative curvature must enjoy a lot of nice properties. In fact, a few years ago, B. Lawson and the second author conjectured

Let N be a three dimensional Riemannian manifold. Let E be a closed embedded surface in N. Then it is a question of basic interest to see whether one can deform: in its isotopy class to some" canonical" embedded surface. From the point of view of geometry, a natural" canonical" surface will be the extremal surface of some functional defined on the space of embedded surfaces. The simplest functional is the area functional. The extremal surface of the area functional is called the minimal surface. Such minimal surfaces were used extensively by Meeks-Yau [MY21 in studying group actions on three dimensional manifolds.