Document Type
Lecture
Publication Date
10-10-2008
Abstract
The ‘uniform’ distribution of many points on the unit sphere is a highly non-trivial problem with applications throughout modern science. Whether one studies electrons in equilibrium from physics, large fullerene compounds from chemistry, orifices of pollen grain from biology, or data encoding from computer science, one arrives at spherical arrangements of points that minimize some energy functional. In this talk, we shall make a short survey of various problems in the literature and focus on the separation properties of extremal configurations and related minimal energy problems.
Relational Format
presentation
Recommended Citation
Dragnev, Peter, "Electrons, Buckyballs, and Orifices: Nature’s Way of Minimizing Energy" (2008). Analysis Seminar. 42.
https://egrove.olemiss.edu/math_analysis/42
