The World population is growing at about 80 million per year.  As time goes by, there is necessarily less space per person. Perhaps this is why the scientific community seems to be obsessed with folding things.  In this lecture Dick James presents a mathematical approach to “rigid folding” inspired by the way atomistic structures form naturally - their features at a molecular level imply desirable features for macroscopic structures as well, especially 4D structures.  Origami structures even suggest an unusual way to look at the Periodic Table.

Richard D. James is Distinguished McKnight University Professor at the University of Minnesota.

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The Oxford Mathematics Public Lectures are generously supported by XTX Markets.

I will present a recent result on the structural stability of 3-D axisymmetric subsonic flows with nonzero swirl for the steady compressible Euler–Poisson system in a cylinder supplemented with non-small boundary data. A special Helmholtz decomposition of the velocity field is introduced for 3-D axisymmetric flow with a nonzero swirl (=angular momentum density) component. This talk is based on a joint work with S. Weng (Wuhan University, China).