Peter McGrath, NC State, Calculus of Variations and the Bending Energy of Surfaces
SAS 1102Beginning with the solution of the classical Plateau problem—the problem of finding an area-minimizing disk whose boundary is a prescribed simple closed curve in Euclidean 3-space—we will survey some applications of Calculus of Variations to solve geometric extremal problems. Particular emphasis will be placed on the problem of finding a smooth surface in 3-space with…