%0 Journal Article %T Biharmonic maps from a 2-sphere %A Ze-Ping Wang %A Ye-Lin Ou %A Han-Chun Yang %J Mathematics %D 2013 %I arXiv %R 10.1016/j.geomphys.2013.12.005 %X Motivated by the rich theory of harmonic maps from a 2-sphere, we study biharmonic maps from a 2-sphere in this paper. We first derive biharmonic equation for rotationally symmetric maps between rotationally symmetric 2-manifolds. We then apply the equation to obtain a classification of biharmonic maps in a family of rotationally symmetric maps between 2-spheres. We also find many examples of proper biharmonic maps defined locally on a 2-sphere. Our results seem to suggest that any biharmonic map $S^2\longrightarrow (N^n, h)$ be a weakly conformal immersion. %U http://arxiv.org/abs/1310.0562v2