Prosjekt- og masteroppgaver for Alexander Schmeding

Prosjektforslagene nedover beskrives på engelsk siden faglitteraturen er på engelsk. (english see below)

Det er ingen krav å skrive oppgaven på engelsk eller å diskutere på engelsk (jeg snakker norsk).

Prosjektene som beskrives nedover er vanligvis tenkt for masterstudenter og er for vanskelig for Bachelor prosjekter (men det kan gå ann å gjøre noe enklere som bachelor prosjekt). Selvfølgelig skal prosjektene tilpasses på grunnlag av forkunnskap.

Kontaktinfo

My work concerns aspects of infinite-dimensional differential geometry and Lie theory. Here are some keywords of structures and objects I am interested in:

• infinite-dimensional Lie groups (e.g. diffeomorphism groups)
• weak and strong Riemannian metrics
• manifolds of mappings
• shape spaces (geometric properties of these spaces, check joint article with E. Celledoni on shape spaces and computer animation )
• differential equations on infinite-dimensional manifolds
• geometric hydrodynamics
• geometry of rough paths

These topic might seem to be abstract and of little practical relevance. However, nothing could be further from the truth! There are many, often surprising, connections between finite-dimensional phenomena and infinite-dimensional geometry. As an example, consider the problem to forecast the weather. You might have experienced that the weather forecast (especially in Trondheim) is often unreliable. In fact, it is practically impossible to accurately forecast the weather for longer than just a few days. The reason is that that the equations governing weather models are sensitive to errors. They amplify any initial error from the observation data. The mathematical proof for this employs infinite-dimensional geometry!

For more examples and some basic objects from differential geometry look at my book on infinite-dimensional geometry (not a prerequisite for the projects). In case you prefer a video lecture on why you should care about infinite-dimensional geometry:

Almost all of my projects involve manifolds. Thus I recommend taking

TMA4192 Differential topology

The course MA3402 Differential Forms on Manifolds is useful, but not necessary for many of the projects. For students interested in working with Lie groups I recommend MA3407 Introduction to Lie theory Courses which are potentially useful (depending on master thesis topic), but not a must:

• TMA4165 Differential Equations and Dynamical Systems
• TMA4225 Foundations of Analysis
• TMA4230 Functional Analysis

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Could consist of getting to know the basic ideas and some tools for an aspect of the above topics. Example: Learn what a Riemannian metric is. Then work out some examples for infinite-dimensional Riemannian manifolds.

For the master projects, you find some areas of interest listed below. They are non-exclusiv and I am happy to discuss variations and proposals for projects. Get in touch if you want to discuss these or other projects (I keep an updated list of concrete projects available on request).

• Calculations of Logarithmic Signature (TU Berlin, 2019, together with P. Friz)
• Limits of Banach spaces (UiB, 2020)

• Differentiability of Products of Formal Power Series (UiB 2020)
• HomologyBasis: Fast Computation of Persistent Homology (UiB, 2021 together with M. Brun)
• Constructions on Manifolds with Boundary (2024, Industrial mathematics project)

• Manifolds of mappings and the group of bisections of a Lie groupoid (2016, StudForsk project, published cf. arXiv)

Manifolds allow us to talk about differentiability of functions defined on them. One often wants to relax the definition of a manifold and consider points on the manifold which are boundary points. The mental picture one should have is to consider a half space in 2D-space. Then the points on the boundary of the half-space are exactly the boundary points. Especially for applications in numerical analysis and to PDE in hydrodynamics it is important to study manifolds of mappings between manifolds *with boundary*. While there are some classical works, especially for smooth and differentiable functions, the boundary case is often not dealt with in the literature. Possible topics include the investigation of spaces of boundary preserving differentiable mappings and manifolds with generalised boundary. The picture below for examples of manifolds with "rough" boundary:

Some introductory reading (parts of the following):

• Knapp A.W.: Stokes’s theorem and Whitney manifolds, 2021
• Glöckner, H.: Diffeomorphism groups of convex polytopes, 2022

The set of smooth mappings between two manifolds appears naturally in many constructions and applications. For example, smooth maps from the unit circle with values in a manifold are called loops and the resulting space of mappings is called a "loop space". These spaces appear naturally in physics applications or in shape analysis. One can endow the space of smooth mappings with a suitable topology and even an (infinite-dimensional) manifold structure which turns natural operations between these manifolds of mappings into smooth mappings. There are many geometric questions connected to spaces of differentiable mappings. For example one could investigate manifolds of mappings for applications in equations on moving domains or Lie groups of differentiable mappings

Some introductory reading reading (parts of)

• Hjelle, E.O. and Schmeding, A.: Strong topologies for spaces of smooth maps with infinite-dimensional target, Expo. Math. 35 no. 1 (2017), pp. 13-53
• Schmeding, A.: Introduction to infinite-dimensional Differential Geometry, CUP 2022.