Definition of "conformal" [conformal]

• Mathematics Designating or specifying a mapping of a surface or region upon another surface so that all angles between intersecting curves remain unchanged. (adjective)
• Of or relating to a map projection in which small areas are rendered with true shape. (adjective)

American Heritage(R) Dictionary of the English Language, Fifth Edition. Copyright (c) 2011 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

• "You argue that there are two difficulties with AdS/CFT: that strong forms of it are inconsistent with the bending of light by gravitational fields, and that the evidence supports a weaker relation that you call conformal induction."
• "Mr. Penrose points out that, as one goes back toward the infinite energy density of the Big Bang, the geometry of the early universe could in some sense be called conformal."
• "Penrose's cyclic cosmological model is a particular application of his conformal compactification construction, which takes any space-time, whether or not it contains singularities, and whether or not it is infinite in time or space, and constructs a finite (compactified) space-time with boundary, whose metric is related to the original metric of space-time by a locally variable scale factor & #937, called the conformal factor."