Talk:Harmonic map

I have disengaged the article "Harmonic map" from its redirection to "Harmonic function". As the new article shows, these two concepts are not just mere synonyms in different contexts, but harmonic maps form a mathematical field of investigation in its own right (harmonic functions being just one example among several others), and therefore deserves an article on its own. Mathanor 19:39, 23 February 2007 (UTC)

Despite the common word "harmonic", harmonic maps don't have much to do with harmonic analysis, so I've reverted Oleg's inclusion of the article into the "Harmonic analysis" category. Mathanor 08:10, 24 February 2007 (UTC)
 * Cool. I am not an expert, really. I just thought that was appropriate since harmonic functions are a particular case of harmonic maps, as you say yourself in the aritcle. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 04:45, 1 March 2007 (UTC)

Some suggestions
First, the sentence "Harmonic maps are the least expanding maps in orthogonal directions" is quite mysterious by itself. Second, I think the marble-elastic analogy is a little confusing. Is there a reference for it? Jjauregui (talk) 01:22, 25 September 2008 (UTC)

Seiki Nishikawa. Variational Problems in Geometry, volume 205 of Translations of Mathematical Monographs. AMS, 2001. AnandJoshi USC (talk) 00:31, 6 March 2009 (UTC)

Unrelated, would an expert like to add mention of definitions for harmonic maps outside of the 'smooth' world of riemannian manifolds? I know they are used, but don't know enough of the original context to be able to say when they are 'the same' —Preceding unsigned comment added by 171.64.38.44 (talk) 23:49, 11 January 2009 (UTC)