Many biological organisms are comprised of deformable porous media, with additional complexity of an embedded muscle. Using geometric variational methods, we derive the equations of motion for the dynamics of such active porous media. The use of variational methods allows to incorporate both the muscle action and incompressibility of the fluid and the elastic matrix…

In this “something for everyone” talk, we will place the matrix decompositions that are so valuable in all fields of computation in a historical abstract context.  It is well known that the singular value decomposition was discussed as far back as the 19th century by Beltrami and Jordan. Lesser known is that Cartan had a blueprint…