Inaugural Professorial Lecture: Misha Kazhdan

Michael (Misha) Kazhdan delivers a lecture as part of the Don P. Giddens Inaugural Professorial Lecture series in recognition of his promotion as a full professor in the Department of Computer Science at Johns Hopkins University.

In a lecture titled "Conformalized Mean Curvature Flow," Kazhdan will revisit a well-studied problem from the mathematical community: the formations of singularities in the mean curvature flow of 2D surfaces. Exploring the flow from the perspective of computer science, he will relate the formation of singularities to a division-by-zero in the implementation. He will show that a simple algorithmic modification that removes the division-by-zero also results in a geometrically simpler flow that empirically has been shown to evolve genus zero surfaces to conformal parameterizations over the round sphere.

The Don P. Giddens Inaugural Professorial Lecture series is named for the fifth dean of the Whiting School of Engineering and started in 1993 to honor newly promoted full professors.