CARMA Colloquium

4:00 pm

Tuesday, 20th Jun 2017

V205, Mathematics Building


Finnur Larusson

(The University of Adelaide)

The rough shape of spaces of soap films

The theory of minimal surfaces (a.k.a. soap films) goes back to Euler’s discovery in 1741 that the catenoid is area-minimising. It is still a remarkably vibrant area of research. I will describe recent joint work with Franc Forstneric of the University of Ljubljana, Slovenia. We assemble all minimal surfaces with a given shape into a space. It is an infinite-dimensional space. What does it look like? We have been able to determine its "rough shape". I will explain what we mean by "rough shape" and describe the ingredients from complex analysis, differential topology, and homotopy theory that go into our result.