We explore the extent to which basic differential operators (such as Laplace-Beltrami, Lamé, Navier-Stokes, etc.) and boundary value problems on a hypersurface S in R n can be expressed globally, in terms of the standard spatial coordinates in R n . The approach we develop also provides, in some important cases, useful simplifications as well as new interpretations of classical operators and equations.Boundary value problems (BVP's) for partial differential equations (PDE's) on surfaces arise in a variety of situations and have many practical applications. See, for example, [15, §72] for the heat conduction by surfaces, [3, §10] for the equations of surface flow, [7], [8] and [13] for shell problems in elasticity, [2] for the vacuum Einstein equations describing gravitational fields, [29] for the Navier-Stokes equations on spherical domains, as well as the references therein. Furthermore, while studying the asymptotic behavior of solutions to elliptic boundary value problems in the neighborhood of a conical point one is led to considering a one-parameter family of boundary value problems in a subdomain S of S n−1 , the unit sphere in R n , naturally associated (via the Mellin transform) with the original elliptic problem. A classical reference in this regard is [16]. Finally, PDE's on surfaces also turn up naturally in the limit case, as the thickness goes to zero, of equations in thin layers or shells. Cf. [7, §3] for the case of elasticity, and [29] and [30] for the case of Navier-Stokes equations.A hypersurface S in R n has the natural structure of a (n − 1)-dimensional Riemannian manifold and the aforementioned PDE's are not the immediate analogues of the ones corresponding to the flat, Euclidean case, since they have to take into consideration geometric characteristics of S such as curvature. Inherently, these PDE's are originally written in local coordinates, intrinsic to the manifold structure of S.The main aim of this paper is to explore the extent to which the most basic partial differential operators (PDO's), as well as their associated boundary value problems, on a hypersurface S in R n , can be expressed globally, in terms of the standard spatial coordinates in R n . It turns out that a convenient way to carry out this program is by employing the so-called Günter derivatives (cf. [11], [14] and [17]): D := (D 1 , D 2 , . . . , D n ) . (0.1)Here, for each 1 ≤ j ≤ n, the first-order differential operator D j is the directional derivative along πe j , where π : R n → T S is the orthogonal projection onto the tangent plane to S and, as usual, e j = (δ jk ) 1≤k≤n ∈ R n , with δ jk denoting the Kronecker symbol. The operator D is globally defined on (as well as tangential to) S, and *