23 Novembre, 2015 14:00 in punto

Seminario Matematico e Fisico di Milano

Growing into the right shape

Alberto Bressan, Pennsylvania State University

Aula U5-3014, Dipartimento di Matematica e Applicazioni Via R. Cozzi, 53 Milano

Living tissues, such as stems, leaves and flowers in plants
and bones in animals, grow into a great variety of shapes.
In some cases, Nature has found ways to control this growth with extremely high accuracy.

In this talk I plan to discuss a few related questions, from a mathematical perspective.
What is the simplest set of PDEs that can describe controlled growth in such a variety of forms?
How can one break away from radial symmetry?
Can one recover familiar shapes of leaves and flowers as stable solutions to a nonlinear eigenvalue problem?

A few results and many open problems in this direction will be presented.