A bound for minimal graphs with a normal at infinity

It is shown that a minimal graph with a normal at infinity is in a-priori bounded vertical distance from its approximating halfcatenoid. This is used to show that the exterior contact angle problem is wellposed under natural geometric conditions on the domain, while the exterior Dirichlet problem can be solvable only for data which satisfy an oscillation bound.This paper was written under the support of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft while the author was visiting the department of mathematics at Stanford University.This article was processed by the author using the LaT_EX style filepljour1 from Springer-Verlag.