Georgia Institute of Technology College of Sciences

Riemann's non-differentiable function, although introduced as a pathological example in analysis, makes an appearance in a certain limiting regime of the theory of binormal flow for vortex lines. From this physical point of view, it also bears some qualitative similarities to turbulent fluid velocity fields in the infinite Reynolds number limit. In this talk, we'll see how this function arises in the study of the vortex filaments, and how we can adapt the notion of intermittency from the study of turbulent flows to this setting. Then, we'll study the fine intermittent nature of this function on small scales. To do so, we define the flatness, an analytic quantity measuring it, in two different ways. One in the physical space, and the other one in the Fourier space. We prove that both expressions diverge logarithmically as the relevant scale parameter tends to 0, which highlights the (weak) intermittent nature of Riemann's function.

This is a joint work with Alexandre Boritchev (Université de Lyon) and Daniel Eceizabarrena (BCAM, Bilbao).