Speaker: Joel Hass, UC Davis

Title: Comparing shapes with geometric energies, and some applications to biology.

Abstract: Almost everything we encounter in our 3-dimensional world is a surface - the outside of a solid object. Comparing the shapes of surfaces is, not surprisingly, a fundamental problem in both theoretical and applied mathematics. Deep results of geometric analysis are now being used to study and compare objects such as bones, brain cortices, proteins and faces. This talk will discuss joint work with Patrice Koehl that introduces a new metric on the space of genus-zero Riemannian surfaces and its applications in shape comparison.  The method is based on a exploring various energies for maps between surfaces, and finding one that gives a metric on the space of shapes.