Georgia Institute of Technology College of Sciences

The classical isoperimetric problem consists in finding among all sets with the same volume (measure) the one that minimizes the surface area (perimeter measure). In the Euclidean case, balls are known to solve this problem. To formulate the isoperimetric problem, or an isoperimetric inequality, in more general settings, requires in particular a good notion of perimeter measure.

The starting point of this talk will be a characterization of sets of finite perimeter original to Ledoux that involves the heat semigroup associated to a given stochastic process in the space. This approach put in connection isoperimetric problems and functions of bounded variation (BV) via heat semigroups, and we will extend these ideas to develop a natural definition of BV functions and sets of finite perimeter on metric measure spaces. In particular, we will obtain corresponding isoperimetric inequalies in this setting.

The main assumption on the underlying space will be a non-negative curvature type condition that we call weak Bakry-Émery and is satisfied in many examples of interest, also in fractals such as (infinite) Sierpinski gaskets and carpets. The results are part of joint work with F. Baudoin, L. Chen, L. Rogers, N. Shanmugalingam and A. Teplyaev.

Several recent papers presented exact time-periodic solutions in shear flow simulations at moderate Reynolds numbers. Although some of these studies demonstrated similarities between turbulence and the unstable periodic orbits, whether one can utilize these orbits for turbulence modeling remained unclear. We argue that this can be achieved by measuring the frequency of turbulence's visits to the periodic orbits. To this end, we adapt methods from computational topology and develop a metric that quantifies shape similarity between the projections of turbulent trajectories and periodic orbits. We demonstrate our method by applying it in a numerical study of the three-dimensional Navier--Stokes equations under sinusoidal forcing. Streamed online: https://gatech.bluejeans.com/7678987299

  We are interested in arithmetic progressions in positive measure subsets of [0,1]^d. After a counterexample by Bourgain, it seemed as if nothing could be said about the longest interval formed by sizes of their gaps. However, Cook, Magyar, and Pramanik gave a positive result for 3-term progressions if their gaps are measured in the l^p-norm for p other than 1, 2, and infinity, and the dimension d is large enough. We establish an appropriate generalization of their result to longer progressions. The main difficulty lies in handling a class of multilinear singular integrals associated with arithmetic progressions that includes the well-known multilinear Hilbert transforms, bounds for which still constitute an open problem. As a substitute, we use the previous work with Durcik and Thiele on power-type cancellation of those transforms, which was, in turn, motivated by a desire to quantify the results of Tao and Zorin-Kranich. This is joint work with Polona Durcik (Caltech).

Animal behavior is often quantified through subjective, incomplete variables that may mask essential dynamics. Here, we develop a behavioral state space in which the full instantaneous state is smoothly unfolded as a combination of short-time posture dynamics. Our technique is tailored to multivariate observations and extends previous reconstructions through the use of maximal prediction. Applied to high-resolution video recordings of the roundworm C. elegans, we discover a low-dimensional state space dominated by three sets of cyclic trajectories corresponding to the worm's basic stereotyped motifs: forward, backward, and turning locomotion. In contrast to this broad stereotypy, we find variability in the presence of locally-unstable dynamics, and this unpredictability shows signatures of deterministic chaos: a collection of unstable periodic orbits together with a positive maximal Lyapunov exponent. The full Lyapunov spectrum is symmetric with positive, chaotic exponents driving variability balanced by negative, dissipative exponents driving stereotypy. The symmetry is indicative of damped, driven Hamiltonian dynamics underlying the worm's movement control.