Georgia Institute of Technology College of Sciences

A trisection is a decomposition of a four-manifold into three trivial pieces and serves as a four-dimensional analogue to a Heegaard decomposition of a three-manifold. In this talk, I will discuss an adaptation of the theory of trisections to the relative setting of knotted surfaces in the four-sphere that serves as a four-dimensional analogue to bridge splittings of classical knots and links. I'll show that every such surface admits a decomposition into three standard pieces called a bridge trisection. I'll also describe how every such decomposition can be represented diagrammatically as a triple of trivial tangles and give a calculus of moves for passing between diagrams of a fixed surface. This is joint work with Alexander Zupan.​

The interactions between particles and fluid have received a bulk of attention due to a number of their applications in the field of, for example, biotechnology, medicine, and in the study of sedimentation phenomenon, compressibility of droplets of the spray, cooling tower plumes, and diesel engines, etc. In this talk, we present coupled hydrodynamic equations which can formally be derived from Vlasov-Boltzmann/Navier-Stokes equations. More precisely, our proposed equations consist of the compressible pressureless Euler equations and the isentropic compressible Navier-Stokes equations. For the coupled system, we establish the global existence of classical solutions when the domain is periodic, and its large-time behavior which shows the exponential alignment between two fluid velocities. We also remark on blow-up of classical solutions in the whole space.

We have studied large, heterogeneous populations of discrete chemical oscillators (~100,000) to characterize two different types of density-dependent transitions to synchronized behavior, a gradual Kuramoto synchronization and a sudden quorum sensing synchronization. We also describe the formation of phase clusters, where each cluster has the same frequency but is phase shifted with respect to other clusters, giving rise to a global signal that is more complex than that of the individual oscillators. Finally, we describe experimental and modeling studies of chimera states and their relation to other synchronization states in populations of coupled chemical oscillators.

In many applications, such as vibration of smart structures (piezoelectric, magnetorestrive, etc.), the physical quantity of interest depends both on the space an time. These systems are mostly modeled by partial differential equations (PDE), and the solutions of these systems evolve on infinite dimensional function spaces. For this reason, these systems are called infinite dimensional systems. Finding active controllers in order to influence the dynamics of these systems generate highly involved problems. The control theory for PDE governing the dynamics of smart structures is a mathematical description of such situations. Accurately modeling these structures play an important role to understanding not only the overall dynamics but the controllability and stabilizability issues. In the first part of the talk, the differences between the finite and infinite dimensional control theories are addressed. The major challenges tagged along in controlling coupled PDE are pointed out. The connection between the observability and controllability concepts for PDE are introduced by the duality argument (Hilbert's Uniqueness Method). Once this connection is established, the PDE models corresponding to the simple piezoelectric material structures are analyzed in the same context. Some modeling issues will be addressed. Major results are presented, and open problems are discussed. In the second part of the talk, a problem of actively constarined layer (ACL) structures is considered. Some of the major results are presesented. Open problems in this context are discussed. Some of this research presented in this talk are joint works with Prof. Scott Hansen (ISU) and Kirsten Morris (UW).