Georgia Institute of Technology School of Mathematics | Georgia Institute of Technology | Atlanta, GA

This thesis has four chapters. The first three concern the location of mass on spheres or projective space, to minimize energies. For the Columb potential on the unit sphere, this is a classical problem, related to arranging electrons to minimize their energy. Restricting our potentials to be polynomials in the squared distance between points, we show in the Chapter 1 that there exist discrete minimal energy distributions. In addition we pose a conjecture on discreteness of minimizers for another class of energies while showing these minimizers must have empty interior.

In Chapter 2, we discover that highly symmetric distributions of points minimize energies over probability measures for potentials which are completely monotonic up to some degree, guided by the work of H. Cohn and A. Kumar. We make conjectures about optima for a class of energies calculated by summing absolute values of inner products raised to a positive power. Through reformulation, these observations give rise to new mixed-volume inequalities and conjectures. Our numerical experiments also lead to discovery of a new highly symmetric complex projective design which we detail the construction for. In this chapter we also provide details on a computer assisted argument which shows optimality of the $600$-cell for such energies (via interval arithmetic).

In Chapter 3 we also investigate energies having minimizers with a small number of distinct inner products. We focus here on discrete energies, confirming that for small $p$ the repeated orthonormal basis minimizes the $\ell_p $-norm of the inner products out of all unit norm configurations. These results have analogs for simplices which we also prove. 

Finally, in Chapter 4 we show that real tight frames that generate lattices must be rational, and that the same holds for other vector systems with structured matrices of outer products. We describe a construction of lattices from distance transitive graphs which gives rise to strongly eutactic lattices. We discuss properties of this construction and also detail potential applications of lattices generated by incoherent systems of vectors.

Adaptive control problems arise in many engineering applications in which one needs to design feedback controllers that ensure tracking of desired reference trajectories while at the same time identify unknown parameters such as control gains. This talk will summarize the speaker's work on adaptive tracking and parameter identification, including an application to curve tracking problems in robotics. The talk will be understandable to those familiar with the basic theory of ordinary differential equations. No prerequisite background in systems and control will be needed to understand and appreciate this talk.

We will present the "a-posteriori" approach to KAM theory.

We formulate an invariance equation and show that an approximate-enough solution which verifies some non-degeneracy conditions leads to a solution.  Note that this does not have any reference to integrable systems and that the non-degeneracy conditions are not global properties of the system, but only properties of the solution. The "automatic reducibility" allows to take advantage of the geometry to develop very efficient Newton methods and show that they converge.

This leads to very efficient numerical  algorithms (which moreover can be proved to lead to correct solutions), to validate formal expansions. From a more theoretical point of view, it can be applied to other geometric contexts (conformally symplectic, presymplectic) and other geometric objects such as whiskered tori. One can deal well with degenerate systems, singular perturbation theory and obtain simple proofs of monogenicity and Whitney regularity.

This is joint work with many people.