- Series
- Research Horizons Seminar
- Time
- Wednesday, September 14, 2011 - 12:05pm for 1 hour (actually 50 minutes)
- Location
- Skiles 005.
- Speaker
- Rafael De La Llave – Georgia Tech.
- Organizer
- Amey Kaloti
Starting in the 30's Physicists were concerned
with the problem of motion of dislocations or the problem
of deposition of materials over a periodic structure.
This leads naturally to a variational problem (minimizing the energy).
One wants to know very delicate properties of the minimizers, which
was a problem that Morse was studying at the same time.
The systematic mathematical study of these problems started in the
80's with the work of Aubry and Mather who developed the basis to
deal with very subtle problems. The mathematics that have become
useful include dynamical systems, partial differential equations,
calculus of variations and numerical analysis. Physical intuition also
helps.
I plan to explain some of the basic questions and, perhaps illustrate some
of the results.