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K-State Today

March 29, 2012

University of Washington professor to give 48th William J. Spencer Lecture today

Submitted by Reta McDermott

Donald Marshall, professor of mathematics at the University of Washington, will give the 48th William J. Spencer Lecture today at 2:30 p.m. in 1018 Throckmorton Hall. Marshall's lecture is titled "Conformal Welding."

Conformal mapping has been a useful tool in science and engineering. Most classical uses involve transplanting a differential equation, such as Laplace's equation, on a complicated region to a simpler region, then pushing the solution on the simpler region back to the original region. Since few conformal maps can be given by an explicit formula, other numerical techniques must be used. In his talk, Marshall will give an elementary method that is fast and accurate. He'll focus on modern applications to conformal welding including recent developments in vision recognition ("the fingerprint" of a region), spectra of certain ODEs, Cauchy transforms of positive measures, trees (graphs) and lemniscates.