The article “Embedded Minimal Surfaces in S^3 and B^3 and Equivariant Eigenvalue Optimization”, written by Assistant Professor Peter McGrath and coauthors Mikhail Karpukhin (Associate Professor, University College London), Robert Kusner (Professor, University of Massachusetts Amherst), Daniel Stern (Assistant Professor, Cornell) has been selected by the Séminaire Bourbaki to be the topic of their Nov 29, 2025 meeting in Paris. Nicolas Bourbaki is the name of a collective of mathematicians whose work has profoundly influenced the development of mathematics over the last 90 years. More details on the history and current activities of the group (whose members list is secret!) can be found on their website: https://www.bourbaki.fr/.

The article is concerned with minimal surfaces—the mathematical realizations of soap films—and a main result shows that each topological type of surface is realized by a minimal surface in the unit ball in 3-dimensional space. Roughly speaking, the topological type of a surface counts the number of “holes” and boundary curves the surface has. This article marks an important advance in our understanding of minimal surfaces.