Georgia Institute of Technology College of Sciences

During the 17th Century the French priest and physicist Edme Mariotte observed that objects floating on a liquid surface can attract or repel each other, and he attempted (without success!) to develop physical laws describing the phenomenon. Initial steps toward a consistent theory came later with Laplace, who in 1806 examined the configuration of two infinite vertical parallel plates of possibly differing materials, partially immersed in an infinite liquid bath and rigidly constrained. This can be viewed as an instantaneous snapshot of an idealized special case of the Mariotte observations. Using the then novel concept of surface tension, Laplace identified particular choices of materials and of plate separation, for which the plates would either attract or repel each other. The present work returns to that two‐plate configuration from a more geometrical point of view, leading to characterization of all modes of behavior that can occur. The results lead to algorithms for evaluating the forces with arbitrary precision subject to the physical hypotheses, and embrace also some surprises, notably the remarkable variety of occurring behavior patterns despite the relatively few available parameters. A striking limiting discontinuity appears as the plates approach each other. A message is conveyed, that small configurational changes can have large observational consequences, and thus easy answers in less restrictive circumstances should not be expected.

I will present a method for constructing periodic or quasi-periodic solutions for forced strongly dissipative systems. Our method applies to the varactor equation in electronic engineering and to the forced non-linear wave equation with a strong damping term proportional to the wave velocity. The strong damping leads to very few small divisors which allows to prove the existence by using a fixed point contraction theorem. The method also leads to efficient numerics. This is joint work with A. Celletti, L. Corsi, and R. de la Llave.

We introduce the (homologically essential) arc complex of a surface as a tool for studying properties of open book decompositions and contact structures. After characterizing destabilizability in terms of the essential translation distance of the monodromy of an open book we given an application of this result to show that there are planer open books of the standard contact structure on the 3-sphere with 5 (or any number larger than 5) boundary components that do not destabilize. We also show that any planar open book with 4 or fewer boundary components does destabilize. This is joint work with John Etnyre.

We show that on any Riemannian manifold with the Ricci curvature non-negative we can construct a coupling of two Brownian motions which are staying fixed distance for all times. We show a more general version of this for the case of Ricci bounded from below uniformly by a constant k. In the terminology of Burdzy, Kendall and others, a shy coupling is a coupling in which the Brownian motions do not couple in finite time with positive probability. What we construct here is a strong version of shy couplings on Riemannian manifolds. On the other hand, this can be put in contrast with some results of von Renesse and K. T. Sturm which give a characterization of the lower bound on the Ricci curvature in terms of couplings of Brownian motions and our construction optimizes this choice in a way which will be explained. This is joint work with Mihai N. Pascu.

Allowing formal desuspensions of maps and objects takes the category of topological spaces to the category of spectra, where cohomology is naturally represented. The EHP spectral sequence encodes how far one can desuspend maps between spheres. It's among the most useful tools for computing homotopy groups of spheres. RP^infty has a cell structure with a cell in each dimension and with attaching maps of degrees ...020202... Note that this sequence is periodic. In fact, it is more than the degrees of these maps which are periodic and a map of Snaith relates this periodicity to the EHP sequence.We will develop the EHP sequence, James periodicity and the relationship between the two.