Circle Packings and Vibrations

Seminar: 
Combinatorics Seminar
Event time: 
Thursday, March 8, 2018 - 4:00pm to 5:00pm
Speaker: 
Stefan Steinerberger
Speaker affiliation: 
Yale
Event description: 

Everybody knows that if one partitions the Euclidean plane into sets, then either some of the sets do not look like circles or some of the circles are a lot bigger than others (Apollonian packings). I will prove a quantitative result in this direction and explain how it can be applied to a very old problem in the study of vibrations that goes back toRichard Courant and to more recent problems of Berard & Helffer (basically: if we want to build a drum orchestra that sounds powerful having limited ressources, what shape are the drums?)