[Public Lecture] "Comparing shapes of genus zero" by Prof Joel Hass (UC Davis)

The Topology and Geometry of Manifolds (Tsvietkova) Unit is pleased to be hosting a public lecture by Prof Joel Hass from The University of California, Davis. This talk is aimed at a general scientific audience. All are welcome to attend. Tea and snacks will follow the talk.

Prof Hass earned his PhD from UC Berkeley in 1981 and joined the UC Davis faculty in 1988, where he has been a full professor since 1994. He was awarded a Sloan Fellowship in 1989-1991, and has held research memberships at The Institute of Advanced Study, Princeton and The Mathematical Sciences Research Institute, Berkeley. Prof Hass has an extensive research record, with publications across a range of fields, including minimal surface theory, knot theory, 3-manifold geometry and topology, and computational geometry and topology. He has also applied his research expertise to geometric problems arising in biology, on topics such as the conformal geometry of proteins.

Title: Comparing shapes of genus zero

Abstract: Almost everything we encounter in our 3-dimensional world is a surface - the outside of a solid object. Moreover there is an explosive increase in the availability of digitized representations of surfaces in 3D. Comparing the shapes of surfaces is, not surprisingly, a fundamental problem in both theoretical and applied mathematics. Facial recognition, drug design and much of radiology, for example, are concerned with comparing and aligning surfaces. Deep mathematical results are now being used to study objects such as bones, brain cortices, proteins and biomolecules by studying their surface geometry. This talk will discuss recent joint work with Patrice Koehl that introduces a new way to align and compare surfaces, and how well it performs relative to other methods and to human experts.