Date & Time: Wednesday, November 27, 2013, 16:00-17:00.
Venue: Ramanujan Hall

Speaker: Yakov Eliashberg, Stanford University

Title: From Holonomic Approximation to Convex Integration: Introduction to the h-principle

Abstract:

It was a surprising discovery in the 1950s by J. Nash and S. Smale of geometrically interesting differential equations and inequalities which exhibited amazing rich spaces of solutions (e.g. Nash's C1-isometric embeddings and Smale's sphere eversions). Later on these examples were generalized and systematized by M. Gromov into a large area, nowadays called the h-principle. In the talk I will describe the main methods of this theory and discuss its old and new applications.