K-State Math Department Women Lecture Series - Spencer Lecture by Irene Fonseca (Carnegie Melon University)
Anna Zemlyanova
The Kansas State University Department of Mathematics is hosting a Women Lecture Series in celebration of the 50th anniversary of the Association for Women in Mathematics. The series includes Distinguished Lectures and colloquium talks by women mathematicians planned throughout 2021. The talks will be streamed live during Spring 2021 and may be streamed live and/or in person during Fall 2021, depending on the circumstances of the pandemic. The talks will be held at 2:30pm-3:20pm Central Time on a Tuesday or a Thursday; there will be time for Q&A at the end of each talk. See the Spring 2021 schedule at https://www.math.k-state.edu/events/wls/
IRENE FONSECA (Carnegie Melon University )
Thursday, April 22nd, 2021, 2:30pm (Central Time)
Streamed live: https://youtu.be/m4d-_pBcCzI
(No registration or sign in needed, unless you would like to ask questions through the chat; in that case, you must login with a gmail account.)
Title: Phase transitions in heterogeneous media: equilibria and geometric flows
Abstract: A variational model in the context of the gradient theory for fluid-fluid phase transitions with small scale heterogeneities is studied. In the case where the scale of the small homogeneities is of the same order of the scale governing the phase transition, the interaction between homogenization and the phase transitions process leads to an anisotropic interfacial energy.
The underlying gradient flow provides unconditional convergence results for an Allen-Cahn type bi-stable reaction diffusion equation in a periodic medium. The limiting dynamics are given by an analog for anisotropic mean curvature flow, of the formulation due to Ken Brakke. As an essential ingredient in the analysis, an explicit expression for the effective surface tension, which dictates the limiting anisotropic mean curvature, is obtained.
This is joint work with Riccardo Cristoferi (Radboud University, The Netherlands), Adrian Hagerty, Cristina Popovici, Rustum Choksi (McGill), Jessica Lin (McGill), and Raghavendra Venkatraman (CMU).
Irene Fonseca is the Kavčić-Moura University Professor of Mathematics and the Director of the Center for Nonlinear Analysis at Carnegie Mellon University. Her main contributions have been on the variational study of ferroelectric and magnetic materials, composites, thin structures, phase transitions, and on the mathematical analysis of image segmentation, denoising, detexturing, registration and recolorization in computer vision. Her research program continues to explore modern methods in the calculus of variations motivated by problems issuing from materials science and imaging science.
Irene Fonseca is a Fellow of the American Mathematical Society (AMS), and a Fellow of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM). She was SIAM President in 2013 and 2014. She is a Grand Officer of the Military Order of Saint James of the Sword (Grande Oficial da Ordem Militar de Sant’Iago da Espada, Portuguese Decoration). She serves in 20 Editorial Boards, including Advances in Calculus of Variations, Archive for Rational Mechanics ans Analysis, ESAIM:COCV (SMAI), Journal of Nonlinear Science, M3AS, and SIAM Journal on Mathematical Analysis.
To learn more abot the William J. Spencer Lecture click here.