Event Series
Event Type
Seminar
Friday, December 9, 2022 1:00 PM
Romain Jacques Higham Speciel

How does the spectral theory of the Laplacian on a surface relate to its geometry? Osgood, Phillips and Sarnak provided a beautiful answer to this question in their pivotal 1988 paper: by carefully studying the eigenvalues of the Laplacian and conformally changing the metric to optimize certain related quantities, we arrive at a constructive proof of the uniformization theorem! In this talk, I will present the precise results mentioned above, provide their proofs and discuss related conjectures.