Optimal Configurations on the Sphere and Other Manifolds
The Optimal Configurations on the Sphere and Other Manifolds Conference was held at Vanderbilt May 17-20, 2010, in conjunction with the 25th Annual Shanks Conference and Lecture.
The conference brought together mathematicians and scientists for the purpose of gaining a better understanding of the structure of particle systems under a variety of physical constraints. These include, for example, classical ground states for interacting particle systems, best-packing, random packings, jammed states, granular and colloidal systems, as well as? minimal discrete and continuous energy problems for general kernels.
Each year, the Shanks Lecture serves as the keynote address for Vanderbilt?s leading mathematics conference.? Noam Elkies of Harvard University was the 2010 Shanks Lecturer. His talk was entitled ?Poisson Summation and Packing Problems.?
The organizing committee of Optimal Configurations on the Sphere and Other Manifolds Conference comprises Henry Cohn of Microsoft Research, Doug Hardin and Ed Saff of Vanderbilt University, and Salvatore Torquato of Princeton University.
Further information is available on the?conference website.
A list of past Shanks Conferences and Lecturers is available?here.