Minimal Energy and Maximal Polarization

Series
School of Mathematics Colloquium
Time
Thursday, October 31, 2013 - 11:00am for 1 hour (actually 50 minutes)
Location
Skiles 006
Speaker
Ed Saff – Vanderbilt University
Organizer
Joseph Rabinoff
This talk deals with problems that are asymptotically related to best-packing and best-covering. In particular, we discuss how to efficiently generate N points on a d-dimensional manifold that have the desirable qualities of well-separation and optimal order covering radius, while asymptotically having a prescribed distribution. Even for certain small numbers of points like N=5, optimal arrangements with regard to energy and polarization can be a challenging problem.