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Geometry-Topology Seminar

Thursday, February 18, 2021 - 4:30pm

Mikhail Karpukhin

Caltech

Location

University of Pennsylvania

via Zoom

The Zoom link is: https://upenn.zoom.us/j/97003688364. This same Zoom link will apply for future talks as well. It is set to open at 4 PM so that speakers can come on early and check out their technology setups. The talks will begin at 4:30 PM. We will also stay afterwards, say from 5:30 - 6 PM to chat with one another, as an online substitute for going out to dinner with our speakers. We encourage everyone to have a nice bottle of wine at hand for that social half hour. For further information about the seminar, please contact Mona Merling (mmerling@math.upenn.edu), Davi Maximo (dmaxim@math.upenn.edu) or Herman Gluck (gluck@math.upenn.edu).

The Laplacian is a canonical second order elliptic operator defined on any Riemannian manifold. The study of upper bounds for its eigenvalues is a classical problem of spectral geometry going back to J. Hersch, P. Li and S.-T. Yau. It turns out that the optimal isoperimetric inequalities for Laplacian eigenvalues are closely related to minimal surfaces in spheres. At the same time, the index of a minimal surface is defined as a number of negative eigenvalues of a different second order elliptic operator. It measures the instability of the surface as a critical point of the area functional.


In the present talk we will discuss the interplay between index and Laplacian eigenvalues, and present some recent applications, including a new bound on the index of minimal spheres as well as the optimal isoperimetric inequality for Laplacian eigenvalues on the projective plane.