Colloquium: "Coboundary operators for infinite frameworks"

Abstract: In this talk I will give an introduction to graph rigidity, a topic with roots in work of Cauchy and Maxwell, and then present some recent work on a related class of infinite matrices. This class includes the incidence matrices of infinite graphs, considered by Mohar and others, and the rigidity matrices of infinite bar-joint frameworks, which arise naturally in chemistry and materials science. The questions we consider are: when do these matrices give rise to bounded operators? Can we compute the operator norms? When are these operators compact? And when are they bounded below? This is joint work with Lefteris Kastis and Stephen Power.

Host: John McCarthy

Tea will be served at 3:30pm in room 200.