ELI5: Explain Like I'm 5

Yamabe flow

Imagine you have a bumpy ball that is not perfectly round. In order to make it round, you could try pushing and pulling at different points on the surface. This is sort of like what the Yamabe flow does with shapes called "manifolds."

A manifold is a shape that math people like to study. It might be very simple, like a flat plane or a smooth surface, or it might be more complicated and have lots of twists and turns. The Yamabe flow takes a manifold and tries to change its shape in a very particular way.

First, imagine that the manifold is like a piece of playdough that you can squish and stretch. The Yamabe flow tries to stretch and squish the playdough in a way that makes it as round as possible. Just like with the bumpy ball, the Yamabe flow picks different points on the manifold and pushes or pulls them to try to make the surface smoother and more evenly shaped.

Why would someone want to do this to a manifold? Well, the shape of a manifold can give us important information about how things move and behave on it. If the manifold is very bumpy or twisted, it can be hard to figure out how things move around. By making the surface smoother and more round, the Yamabe flow makes it easier to understand the behavior of different things that might be moving around on the manifold.

So, in summary, the Yamabe flow tries to make manifolds as round and smooth as possible by pushing and pulling different points on the surface. This can help us better understand how things move and behave on manifolds.