Dipartimento di Matematica "Giuseppe Peano"

Lezione lagrangiana

Why Celestial Mechanics?

Relatore:
Andreas Knauf
FAU Erlangen

Data e luogo:
18 aprile 2024 dalle 14.30 alle 15.30
in Aula A, Palazzo Campana, Via Carlo Alberto 10, Torino

Abstract  
As we all know, celestial mechanics was vital for the development of science. Within mathematics, it gave significant impetus to topology, the theory of ordinary differential equations and analysis as a whole. Today, it is largely an applied science, numerically predicting the paths of celestial bodies and of satellites. So why should ’pure’ mathematicians work in this area today? This lecture, which is aimed at non-specialists, presents some reasons.

Short Bio 
Andreas Knauf is an Emeritus Professor of mathematics (and mathematical physics) at the Friedrich-Alexander-Universit¨at Erlangen-N¨urnberg. He has a very wide area of research interests from classical, statistical, and quantum mechanics to dynamical systems, chaos and scattering theory, with some of his work even reaching out to number theory or biology. Besides an impressive body of research articles, he has written several books, including an influential book on classical mechanics with almost 700 pages.

Andreas Knauf obtained his PhD from the Freie Universit¨at Berlin in 1986 with a thesis on ergodic and topological properties of Hamiltonian systems.