$L^2$-geometry of diffeomorphism groups and the equations of hydrodynamics

Series
PDE Seminar
Time
Tuesday, January 28, 2014 - 3:00pm for 1 hour (actually 50 minutes)
Location
Skiles 006
Speaker
Gerard Misiolek – University of Notre Dame
Organizer
Geng Chen
In 1966 V. Arnold observed that solutions to the Euler equations of incompressible fluids can be viewed as geodesics of the kinetic energy metric on the group of volume-preserving diffeomorphisms. This introduced Riemannian geometric methods into the study of ideal fluids. I will first review this approach and then describe results on the structure of singularities of the associated exponential map and (time premitting) related recent developments.