Spring School 2024

This spring school aims to provide a forum to highlight some recent mathematical theories, that address several analytical challenges of complex materials with microstructure, such as nematic liquid crystals, colloids, electronic structures and elastomers.

Contrarily to standard materials, the mathematical understanding of these media continues to improve as new experiments and applications become available. The rather involved characteristics and phenomena that these materials present is reflected by the underlying partial differential equations or energy functionals that model their structure and/or dynamics.

We aim to convey a broad spectrum of subjects, by means of advanced techniques in the theory of partial differential equations, multiscale analysis and the calculus of variations.

• Carlos J. García-Cervera, University of California, Santa Barbara
  Mathematical Foundations of Electronic Structure Theory
   
• Martin Kružík, Czech Academy of Sciences
  Variational approaches to time-dependent problems in solid mechanics
   
• Apala Majumdar, University of Strathclyde
  Solution Landscapes for Nematic Liquid Crystals and their Applications
   
• Elisabetta Rocca, University of Pavia
  Cahn-Hilliard-type phase-field theory coupled with large elasticdeformations
   
• Arghir Zarnescu, Basque Center for Applied Mathematics
  Design of nematic liquid crystals through colloidal homogenisation