Past Brooke Benjamin Lecture

The Elusive Singularity

I will describe the open problems of singularity formation in incompressible fluids. I will discuss a list of related models, some results, and some more open problems.

Date: Monday, 11 November 2024 

Time: 5pm GMT

Location: Lecture Theatre 1, Mathematical Institute 

Speaker: Professor Peter Constantin            

Peter Constantin is the John von Neumann Professor of Mathematics and Applied and Computational Mathematics at Princeton University. Peter Constantin received his B.A and M.A. summa cum laude from the University of Bucharest, Faculty of Mathematics and Mechanics. He obtained his Ph.D. from The Hebrew University of Jerusalem under the direction of Shmuel Agmon.

Constantin’s work is focused on the analysis of PDE and nonlocal models arising in statistical and nonlinear physics. Constantin worked on scattering for Schr¨odinger operators, on finite dimensional aspects of the dynamics of Navier-Stokes equations, on blow up for models of Euler equations. He introduced active scalars, and, with Jean-Claude Saut, local smoothing for general dispersive PDE. Constantin worked on singularity formation in fluid interfaces, on turbulence shell models, on upper bounds for turbulent transport, on the inviscid limit, on stochastic representation of Navier-Stokes equations, on the Onsager conjecture. He worked on critical nonlocal dissipative equations, on complex fluids, and on ionic diffusion in fluids.

Constantin has advised thirteen graduate students in mathematics, and served in the committee of seven graduate students in physics. He mentored twenty-five postdoctoral associates. 

Constantin served as Chair of the Mathematics Department of the University of Chicago and as the Director of the Program in Applied and Computational Mathematics at Princeton University.

Constantin is a Fellow of the Institute of Physics, a SIAM Fellow, and Inaugural Fellow of the American Mathematical Society, a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a member of the National Academy of Sciences

Complex dynamics underlying industrial manufacturing depend in part on
multiphase multiphysics, in which fluids and materials interact across
orders of magnitude variations in time and space. In this talk, we will
discuss the development and application of a host of numerical methods for
these problems, including Level Set Methods, Voronoi Implicit Interface
Methods, implicit adaptive representations, and multiphase discontinuous
Galerkin Methods.  Applications for industrial problems will include modeling
how foams evolve, how electro-fluid jetting devices work, and
the physics and dynamics of rotary bell spray painting across the automotive
industry.