3/8 – Professor Tom Braden: Geometry of Machines

Wednesday, March 8th, 5-6pm in LGRT 1528 we hear from Professor Tom Braden about the “Geometry of machines”:

Configuration spaces are one way to construct very interesting geometric
spaces. A configuration space is a space whose points represent
possible states in a mechanism or other physical system. Navigating
along a path inside the space is then represented by a motion of the
mechanism. Some quite complicated and high dimensional spaces which
cannot be visualized directly can be explored very concretely in this way.

I will focus mainly on configuration spaces of planar bar-and-joint
machines, which are machines in the plane made from rigid bars, hinges,
and anchors. Amazingly, a theorem of Kapovich and Milson says roughly
that any manifold can appear as (part of) the configuration space of
such a machine.

As always, there will be pizza and soda!