Related papers: Energy-minimal Principles in Geometric Function Th…
A geometric setup for control theory is presented. The argument is developed through the study of the extremals of action functionals defined on piecewise differentiable curves, in the presence of differentiable non-holonomic constraints.…
This is a guided tour through some selected topics in geometric analysis. We have chosen to illustrate many of the basic ideas as they apply to the theory of minimal surfaces. This is, in part, because minimal surfaces is, if not the…
Lecture notes of a course on birational geometry (taught at College de France, Winter 2011, with the support of Fondation Sciences Math\'ematiques de Paris). Topics covered: introduction into the subject, contractions and extremal rays,…
This is the text of my report presented at the 29th Solvay Conference on Physics on `The Structure and Dynamics of Disordered Systems' held in Bruxelles from October 19 to 21, 2023. I consider the problem of minimizing a random energy…
A geometric setup for constrained variational calculus is presented. The analysis deals with the study of the extremals of an action functional defined on piecewise differentiable curves, subject to differentiable, non-holonomic…
In this thesis I explore challenging discrete energy minimization problems that arise mainly in the context of computer vision tasks. This work motivates the use of such "hard-to-optimize" non-submodular functionals, and proposes methods…
Since the second half of the 20th century, Pontryagin's Maximum Principle has been widely discussed and used as a method to solve optimal control problems in medicine, robotics, finance, engineering, astronomy. Here, we focus on the proof…
We revisit the basic variational formulation of the minimization problem associated with the micromagnetic energy, with an emphasis on the treatment of the stray field contribution to the energy, which is intrinsically non-local. Under…
These lecture notes are based on a set of six lectures that I gave in Edinburgh in 2008/2009 and they cover some topics in the interface between Geometry and Physics. They involve some unsolved problems and conjectures and I hope they may…
Recent developments in extreme value statistics have established the so-called geometric approach as a powerful modelling tool for multivariate extremes. We tailor these methods to the case of spatial modelling and examine their efficacy at…
We study measures and point configurations optimizing energies based on multivariate potentials. The emphasis is put on potentials defined by geometric characteristics of sets of points, which serve as multi-input generalizations of the…
In this short survey article, we showcase a number of non-trivial geometric problems that have recently been resolved by marrying methods from functional calculus and real-variable harmonic analysis. We give a brief description of these…
We review some techniques from non-linear analysis in order to investigate critical paths for the action functional in the calculus of variations applied to physics. Previous attempts to analyse when these are minima ex- ist, but mainly…
In the context of Discontinuous Galerkin methods, we study approximations of nonlinear variational problems associated with convex energies. We propose element-wise nonconforming finite element methods to discretize the continuous…
Talk given at the Workshop on "Constraint Theory and Quantization Methods"; Montepulciano, Italy, June 1993 --- Instead of attempting to give a summary or to identify highlights of the workshop, the history of the development of analytical…
These notes arose from a mini lecture series the author gave at the Early Career Researchers Workshop on Geometric Analysis and PDEs, held in January 2020 at the Matrix institute of the University of Melbourne. We discussed some classical…
We investigate a singularly perturbed, non-convex variational problem arising in materials science with a combination of geometrical and numerical methods. Our starting point is a work by Stefan M\"uller, where it is proven that the…
This review is based on two lectures given at the 2000 TMR school in Torino. We discuss two main themes: i) Moyal-type deformations of gauge theories, as emerging from M-theory and open string theories, and ii) the noncommutative geometry…
This article is devoted to the study of certain models for phase transitions involving nonlocal energies. A first part is concerned with to the asymptotic analysis of a system of fractional elliptic equations of Allen-Cahn type as a…
These notes were delivered as a series of NIMROD lectures at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory by the author in February 1976 (RL-76-022). The purpose of these lectures was primarily two-fold: to discuss the classical theory of free point…