Pure Mathematics Department, University of Waterloo
Matthew Beckett
“The geometry of Yang-Mills fields, Part 01”
Throughout the spring 2013 term, we will (as a group) be reading through and lecturing on ”The Geometry of Yang-Mills Fields” by Sir Michael Atiyah. All are welcome to attend.
Saifuddin
Syed
”The second fundamental form and minimal immersions”
The extrinsic geometry of an immersed submanifold L of a Riemannian manifold M, with the induced metric, is measured by the second fundamental form, a symmetric bilinear form on L with values in the normal bundle of L in M. We will introduce this tensor, and give a characterization of the vanishing of its trace (when M = R3 and dim L = 2) in terms of critical immersions of the area functional.