12/12 The Best Possible Shapes of Surfaces
If you are interested in mathematics, see the lecture of professor Rober Bryant
from Duke University. The talk is supposed to be understandable to a wide range
of scientists and students.
12 December 2018, 5:00 PM
Refectory of Augustinian Abbey at Mendel Square - Mendel Museum
About the lecture
Much of classical mathematics involves finding a configuration or shape that
provides an optimum solution to a problem. For example, it has long been known
(though a rigorous proof took quite a while to find) that the surface of least
area enclosing a given volume is a round sphere. There are many other ways to
measure surfaces, though, and finding 'the' surface that optimizes a given
'measurement' (subject to some given constraints) remains a challenging problem
that has motivated some of the deepest recent work in the mathematics of
geometric shapes.
In this talk, I will explain some of the classic ways to measure shapes of
surfaces and relate this to classical problems involving surface area (soap
films and bubbles) and total curvature as well to as recent progress by myself
and others on these important optimization problems.
