Juan Criado del Rey (KU Leuven) will speak in the geometry seminar on Tuesday 24 September 2019 at 11am in the Salle de Profs. Juan’s title is Minimal energy configurations on compact manifolds and his abstract is below.
Distributing points on spheres and other manifolds is a very classical problem. Its modern formulation in terms of energy-minimizing configurations is due to the discoverer of the electron J. J. Thomson who in 1904 posed the question: “In which position (within some set such as a ball or a sphere) would N electrons lie in order to minimize their electrostatic potential?” In this talk I will present some results about minimal energy points on compact manifolds and I will introduce a couple of connections to problems in Numerical Analysis.