Previous Special Year Seminar

Oct
02
2018

Variational Methods in Geometry Seminar

On the existence of minimal Heegaard splittings
Dan Ketover
3:30pm|Simonyi Hall 101

In the 80s Pitts-Rubinstein conjectured that certain kinds of Heegaard surfaces in three-manifolds can be isotoped to index 1 minimal surfaces. I’ll describe in detail a proof of their conjecture and some applications. This is joint work with...

Oct
02
2018

Variational Methods in Geometry Seminar

Prescribing scalar curvature in high dimension
1:00pm|Simonyi Hall 101

We consider the classical problem of prescribing the scalar curvature of a manifold via conformal deformation of the metric, dating back to works by Kazdan and Warner. This problem is mainly understood in low dimensions, where blow-ups of solutions...

Sep
25
2018

Variational Methods in Geometry Seminar

Extremal eigenvalue problems and free boundary minimal surfaces in the ball
10:00am|Simonyi Hall 101

When we choose a metric on a manifold we determine the spectrum of the Laplace operator. Thus an eigenvalue may be considered as a functional on the space of metrics. For example the first eigenvalue would be the fundamental vibrational frequency...