Materials Working Group, 2015-2016
Organized by Bob Kohn

"Materials Working Group" talks are mainly by people at Courant
(students, postdocs, visitors and faculty), discussing their
recent or current work. The talks are informal, with 
plenty of discussion. A record of last year's activity
is here. 

Our timeslot in 2015-2016 is Tuesday at 11-12 in WWH 1314. (We often
run over, but not too much since the COB seminar meets in the same room
at 12:30.) 
 
An email list for relevant announcements is
maintained by Bob Kohn (kohn at cims dot nyu dot edu).

Spring 2016:

March 8: John Clayton (Army Research Lab and Univ of Maryland, visiting 
CIMS until 6/1) will speak on "A new theory of deformable solids with 
microstructure based on Finsler differential geometry."

March 22: Ethan O'Brien (CIMS) will discuss current work concerning
thin elastic rods with misfit.

March 29: Alex Misiats (CIMS) will discuss current work on a nonlinear 
variational problem modeling "zig-zag walls." Mathematically, it involves
a nonconvex variational problem with small surface energy as a regularizing 
singular perturbation. 

April 5: David Padilla-Garza (CIMS) will discuss his work on a 
hyperbolic-geometry analogue of the classical Kepler problem.  

April 12: no meeting (the talk previously announced by 
Yoshikazu Giga has been cancelled)

April 19: Gilles Francfort (Univ Paris Nord and CIMS) will discuss
recent work on "Plastic slip and uniqueness in elasto-plasticity". 

April 26: Nadejda Drenska (CIMS) will speak on "A PDE approach
to some randomized-strategy two-player games". This work addresses
a model problem from the machine learning literature, using methods 
from optimal control. The value function turns out (after passage 
to a continuous limit) to solve a nonlinear elliptic pde.

May 3: Emilio Zappa (CIMS) will discuss ongoing work with 
Miranda Holmes-Cerfon, concerning computational methods for the
study of self-assembly of colloidal clusters. Here is an abstract.

Fall 2015:

Oct 20: Alex Mesiats (CIMS) will speak on "The Ginzburg-Landau model of 
superconductivity with prescribed topological degree at the boundary." 

Oct 27: Ethan O'Brien (CIMS) will discuss his work on the wrinkling of
a stretched and twisted elastic ribbon.

November: no talks planned.

Dec 1: Ross Lund (NJIT) will speak on "A reduced model for oscillatory 
switching of thin-film nanomagnets under the influence of applied spin-torque"
(joint work with Cyrill Muratov, Andrew Kent, and Gabriel Chaves-O'Flynn).

Dec 15: Emilio Zappa (CIMS) will speak on "A group theoretical approach to
structural transitions of icosahedral quasicrystals."