How to stretch taffy most efficiently?

Series
Research Horizons Seminar
Time
Wednesday, September 27, 2017 - 12:10pm for 1 hour (actually 50 minutes)
Location
Skiles 006
Speaker
Balazs Strenner – GA Tech – http://people.math.gatech.edu/~bstrenner7/
Organizer
Timothy Duff
Taffy pullers are machines designed to stretch taffy. They can modeled by surface homeomorphisms, therefore they can be studied by geometry and topology. I will talk about how efficiency of taffy pullers can be defined mathematically and what some of the open questions are. I will also talk about Macaw, a computer program I am working on, which does related computations and which will hopefully help answer some of the open questions.