Research of Math Professors
Featured on Notices Cover
A paper by two Vanderbilt Mathematics Professors is the featured cover article in the November Notices of the American Mathematical Society. “Discretizing Manifolds via Minimum Energy Points,” by Professors Doug Hardin and Edward Saff, describes the authors’ recent discoveries regarding the asymptotics of optimal Riesz energy configurations. Their work will appear in detail in an upcoming issue of Advances in Mathematics.
The Notices is one of the two publications of the American Mathematical Society that are distributed to all its members. It has approximately 30,000 subscribers worldwide, and as such is one of the most widely distributed math journals.
The illustration on the November Notices cover shows 1,000 points on a torus distributed so as to minimize various Riesz potentials 1/rs. As explained in the article, the limit distribution as the number of points becomes infinite is, remarkably, just the uniform distribution for all values of s greater than or equal to 2 (the dimension of the torus).
The data for all images, and the actual images of the many “blue & green bagels with red poppy seeds” (as Saff refers to them) were produced by Rob Womersley of the University of New South Wales.
Hardin and Saff's research has also been featured:
-- In Exploration, Vanderbilt's online research journal. Click here to read that story.
-- On National Public Radio's "Weekend Edition." Click here to listen to that report.
Date Posted: Oct. 20, 2004