Group Members

Cory McCartan, Laura LeGare, Caitlin Davis.

Supervisors

Luke Rogers, Sweta Pandey.

Overview

Geodesics (shortest paths) on manifolds such as planes and spheres are well understood.  Geodesics on fractal sets such as the Sierpinski Triangle are much more complicated.  We begin by constructing algorithms for building shortest paths and provide explicit formulas for computing their lengths.  We then turn to the question of interpolation along geodesics—given two subsets of the Sierpinski Triangle, we “slide” points in one set along geodesics to the other set.  We construct a measure along the interpolated sets which formalizes a notion of the interpolation of a distribution of mass, and we prove interesting self-similarity relations about this measure.

Publication

Presentation

Poster

Group Members

Carlos Lima,  Malcolm Gabbard.

Supervisors

Gamal Mograby,  Luke Rogers,  Sasha Teplyaev.

Overview

At the end of the 20th century studies had been conducted on the Koch Snowflake which had been motivated through work done by physicists on “fractal drum” experiments. These investigations focused on the eigenfunctions of the negative Dirichlet Lapcian generated on a planar domain with a fractal boundary, particularly with the condition that the boundary be set to zero. Here we study the eigenfunctions on the Koch Snowflake with a non-zero boundary condition and we consider a Laplacian defined on the boundary. To generate an n-level fractal and apply the Laplacian matrix, Python programming was implemented for both the n-level fractal and Laplacian matrix. This then gives us insight into the eigenvalues and visualization of the corresponding eigenfunctions on the Koch Snowflake. Initial observations indicate a kind of localization of the eigenfunctions on the fractal boundary. 

Publication

Presentation

Poster

Each year we are looking for a group of undergraduate students to work on Probability, Analysis and Mathematical Physics on Fractals. The aim of the projects will be exploration of differential equations and various operators on fractal domains. Students in the project are supposed to have the usual background in linear algebra and differential equations. Knowledge of Matlab, Mathematica, other computer algebra systems, or programming, as well as proof writing, mathematical analysis, and probability may be helpful but is not required. Previous undergraduate work includes published papers on the eigenmodes (vibration modes) of the Laplacian (2nd derivative) of functions that live on Sierpinski gasket type fractals, and the electrical resistance of fractal networks, as well as work on Laplacians on projective limit spaces. The exact choice of the topics to study will depend on the students’ background and interests. Besides being interesting, taking part in a research project like this may be very useful in the future (for instance, when applying to graduate schools).

Luke Rogers, Gamal Mograby, Sasha Teplyaev, Patricia Alonso-Ruiz