Title: Incompatible elasticity: theory and applications
Speaker: Prof. Raz Kupferman
Affiliation: Institute of Mathematics, The Hebrew University, Jerusalem, Israel
Date: Friday February 26th
Time: 14:00
Zoom Meeting
To request the event link, please contact to the department.
Abstract: Incompatible elasticity is a term coined in the 1950s to describe the continuum theorem of elastic solids in the presence of defects; the point of view, which was novel at that time, is that defects modify the intrinsic geometry of the body, making it incompatible with the ambient space. Incompatible elasticity has seen a renewed interest in recent years in the context of both natural and man-made systems, which can be viewed as metrically frustrated. From a mathematical point of view, incompatible elasticity can be described as a problem of optimally embedding one Riemannian manifold (the body) into another Riemannian manifold (ambient space). In this lecture I will review the mathematical theory of incompatible elasticity, along with its dimensionally-reduced versions of so-called non-Euclidean plates and shells. Various examples will be given. No advanced knowledge in differential geometry will be assumed.
Bio: Prof. Kupferman did all his degrees in Physics, completing his PhD in 1995 at Tel-Aviv University. From 1996-1998 he was a postdoc in the Mathematics department at University of California at Berkeley. In 1998 he joined the Einstein Institute of Mathematics at the Hebrew University. In the past decade, his research focuses on geometrical aspects of material science. Besides his work as a mathematician, he is also active in mathematical education, both on a national level and as a founder of Matific, i.e. a suite of multilingual educational apps for children comprising 1500 games, each offering a progression of hands-on activities that address one or more mathematical concepts, skill or insight.