10/6/2011

Feng Luo
Rutgers University

Volume optimization on triangulated 3-manifolds

We propose a finite dimensional variational principle on triangulated 3-manifolds so that its critical points are related to solutions to Thurston?s equation and Haken?s normal surface equation. The action functional is the volume. This is a generalization of an earlier program by Casson and Rivin for compact 3-manifolds with torus boundary