Finite Element Methods for Intrinsic Geometric Flows

Partial differential equations governing unknown or evolving geometries are ubiquitous in applications and challenging to discretize. A great deal of numerical work in this area has focused on extrinsic geometric flows, where the evolving geometry is a curve or surface embedded in Euclidean space. Much less attention has been paid to the discretization of intrinsic geometric flows, where the evolving geometry is described by a Riemannian metric. This talk will present finite element discretizations of such flows.