The notion of conformal infinity has a long history within the research in Einstein's theory of gravity. Today, "conformal infinity" is related to almost all other branches of research in general relativity, from quantisation procedures to abstract mathematical issues to numerical applications. This review article attempts to show how this concept gradually and inevitably evolved from physical issues, namely the need to understand gravitational radiation and isolated systems within the theory of gravitation, and how it lends itself very naturally to the solution of radiation problems in numerical relativity. The fundamental concept of null-infinity is introduced. Friedrich's regular conformal field equations are presented and various initial value problems for them are discussed. Finally, it is shown that the conformal field equations provide a very powerful method within numerical relativity to study global problems such as gravitational wave propagation and detection.

中文翻译：

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 共形无穷大。


共形无穷大的概念在爱因斯坦引力理论的研究中有着悠久的历史。如今，“共形无穷大”几乎与广义相对论的所有其他研究分支相关，从量化过程到抽象数学问题再到数值应用。这篇评论文章试图展示这个概念如何逐渐地、不可避免地从物理问题演变而来，即需要理解引力理论中的引力辐射和孤立系统，以及它如何非常自然地解决数值相对论中的辐射问题。介绍了零无穷大的基本概念。提出了弗里德里希正则共形场方程并讨论了它们的各种初值问题。最后，研究表明，共形场方程为数值相对论中研究引力波传播和探测等全局问题提供了一种非常强大的方法。