Monday, September 28, 2015 (3:30 p.m. in Yost 102)

Title: Elastic Curves in Manifolds

Speaker: David Singer (Professor and Interim Chair, Mathematics, Applied Mathematics, & Statistics, Case Western Reserve University)

Abstract: The bending energy of a curve in a (Riemannian) manifold is the integral of its squared geodesic curvature. Critical points of this functional are elastic curves. We discuss the analysis and geometry of this functional and in particular the solutions in 2-dimensional space forms.