Spaces of Harmonic Functions

It is important and interesting to study harmonic functionson a Riemannian manifold. In an earlier work of Li and Tam 21]it was demonstrated that the dimensions of various spaces ofbounded and positive harmonic functions are closely relatedto the number of ends of a manifold. For the linear space consistingof all harmonic functions of polynomial growth of degree atmost d on a complete Riemannian manifold Mⁿ of dimension n,denoted by H_d(Mⁿ), it was proved by Li and Tam 20] that thedimension of the space H₁(M) always satisfies dimH₁(M) dimH₁(Rⁿ)when M has non-negative Ricci curvature. They went on to askas a refinement of a conjecture of Yau 32] whether in generaldim H_d(Mⁿ) dimH_d(Rⁿ)for all d. Colding and Minicozzi made animportant contribution to this question in a sequence of papers5–11] by showing among other things that dimH_d(M) isfinite when M has non-negative Ricci curvature. On the otherhand, in a very remarkable paper 16], Li produced an elegantand powerful argument to prove the following. Recall that Msatisfies a weak volume growth condition if, for some constantA and , (1.1) for all x M and r R, where V_x(r) is the volume of the geodesicball B_x(r) in M; M has mean value property if there exists aconstant B such that, for any non-negative subharmonic functionf on M, (1.2) for all p M and r > 0.