The Linearized System for Isometric Embeddings and Its Characteristic Variety

Series
PDE Seminar
Time
Tuesday, November 3, 2009 - 3:05pm for 1.5 hours (actually 80 minutes)
Location
Skiles 255
Speaker
Qing Han – University of Notre Dame – http://www.nd.edu/~mathwww/faculty/han.shtml
Organizer
Zhiwu Lin
We prove a conjecture of Bryant, Griffiths, and Yang concerning the characteristic variety for the determined isometric embedding system. In particular, we show that the characteristic variety is not smooth for any dimension greater than 3. This is accomplished by introducing a smaller yet equivalent linearized system, in an appropriate way, which facilitates analysis of the characteristic variety.