The Calabi-Yau conjectures for embedded surfaces

In this paper we will prove the Calabi-Yau conjectures for embedded surfaces (i.e., surfaces without self-intersection). In fact, we will prove considerably more. The heart of our argument is very general and should apply to a variety of situations, as will be more apparent once we describe the main steps of the proof later in the introduction. The Calabi-Yau conjectures about surfaces date back to the 1960s. Much work has been done on them over the past four decades. In particular, examples of Jorge-Xavier from 1980 and Nadirashvili from 1996 showed that the immersed versions were false; we will show here that for embedded surfaces, i.e., injective immersions, they are in fact true. Their original form was given in 1965 in [Ca] where E. Calabi made the following two conjectures about minimal surfaces (they were also promoted by S. S. Chern at the same time; see page 212 of [Ch]):