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Woden Kusner, University of Georgia, Measuring chirality with the wind
April 8, 2021 | 2:00 pm - 3:00 pm EDT
The question of measuring “handedness” is of some significance in both mathematics and in the real world. Propellors and screws, proteins and DNA, in fact *almost everything* is chiral. Can we quantify chirality? Or can we perhaps answer the question:
“Are your shoes more left-or-right handed than a potato?”
We can begin with the hydrodynamic principle that chiral objects rotate when placed in a collimated flow (or wind). This intuition naturally leads to a trace-free tensorial chirality measure for space curves and surfaces, with a clear physical interpretation measuring twist. As a consequence, the “average handedness” of an object with respect to this measure will always be 0. This also strongly suggests that a posited construction of Lord Kelvin–the isotropic helicoid–does not exist. This is joint with Giovanni Dietler, Rob Kusner, Eric Rawdon and Piotr Szymczak
Organizer: P. McGrath