Previous Special Year Seminar

Feb
26
2019

Variational Methods in Geometry Seminar

Ancient gradient flows of elliptic functionals
Christos Mantoulidis
3:30pm|Simonyi Hall 101

We study closed ancient solutions to gradient flows of elliptic functionals in Riemannian manifolds, including the mean curvature flow. As an application, we show that an ancient (arbitrarycodimension) mean curvature flow in $S^n$ with low area must...

Feb
26
2019

Variational Methods in Geometry Seminar

Geodesic nets: examples and open problems.
1:00pm|Simonyi Hall 101

Geodesic nets on Riemannian manifolds is a natural generalization of geodesics. Yet almost nothing is known about their classification or general properties even when the ambient Riemannian manifold is the Euclidean plane or the round 2-sphere.

In...

Feb
19
2019

Variational Methods in Geometry Seminar

Invariant metrics and the Greene-Wu conjectures
3:30pm|Simonyi Hall 101

It has been conjectured that a simply-connected complete Kahler manifold of negatively pinched sectional curvature is biholomorphic to a bounded domain in complex Euclidean space. One evidence is that the manifold is Stein, which is, in particular...

Feb
19
2019

Variational Methods in Geometry Seminar

On minimizers and critical points for anisotropic isoperimetric problems
1:00pm|Simonyi Hall 101

Anisotropic surface energies are a natural generalization of the perimeter functional that arise in models in crystallography and in scaling limits for certain probabilistic models on lattices. This talk focuses on two results concerning...

Feb
12
2019

Variational Methods in Geometry Seminar

Isoperimetry and boundaries with almost constant mean curvature
3:30pm|Simonyi Hall 101

We review various recent results aimed at understanding bubbling into spheres for boundaries with almost constant mean curvature. These are based on joint works with Giulio Ciraolo (U Palermo), Matias Delgadino (Imperial College London), Brian...

Feb
12
2019

Variational Methods in Geometry Seminar

Min-max solutions of the Ginzburg-Landau equations on closed manifolds
Daniel Stern
1:00pm|Simonyi Hall 101

We will describe recent progress on the existence theory and asymptotic analysis for solutions of the complex Ginzburg-Landau equations on closed manifolds, emphasizing connections to the existence of weak minimal submanifolds of codimension two. On...

Feb
05
2019

Variational Methods in Geometry Seminar

On the topology and index of minimal surfaces
3:30pm|Simonyi Hall 101

For an immersed minimal surface in $R^3$, we show that there exists a lower bound on its Morse index that depends on the genus and number of ends, counting multiplicity. This improves, in several ways, an estimate we previously obtained bounding the...

Feb
05
2019

Variational Methods in Geometry Seminar

Spacetime positive mass theorem
1:00pm|Simonyi Hall 101

It is fundamental to understand a manifold with positive scalar curvature and its topology. The minimal surface approach pioneered by R. Schoen and S.T. Yau have advanced our understanding of positively curved manifolds. A very important result is...

Jan
29
2019

Variational Methods in Geometry Seminar

The systole of large genus minimal surfaces in positive Ricci curvature
Henrik Matthiesen
3:30pm|Simonyi Hall 101

We prove that the systole (or more generally, any k-th homology systole) of a minimal surface in an ambient three manifold of positive Ricci curvature tends to zero as the genus of the minimal surfaces becomes unbounded. This is joint work with Anna...

Jan
29
2019

Variational Methods in Geometry Seminar

Minmax minimal surfaces in arbitrary codimension with
Tristan Rivière
1:00pm|Simonyi Hall 101

We shall present a procedure which to any admissible family of immersions of surfaces into an arbitrary closed riemannian manifolds assigns a smooth, possibly branched, minimal surface whose area is equal to the width of the corresponding minmax and...