一小时邀请报告简介之三：金属、磁铁和数学

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一小时邀请报告简介之三：金属、磁铁和数学
（转自2006年国际数学家大会官方网站）

Plenary Lecture: Robert V. Kohn
Metals, Magnets and Mathematics
When most people see the structure of metals they never think to ask themselves if this solid material was once a liquid. This is not the case of Robert V. Kohn, who during the ICM2006 will deliver a plenary lecture on “Energy-Driven Pattern Formations”. This North American mathematician studies what happens in samples of what are known as crystalline solids undergo a martensite transition phase. No, this is not an encrypted language, but rather technical terminology referring to the study of the moment at which a metal with certain “martensite” properties (see link) starts to change from a liquid to a solid.
Computer hard discs also fall under Kohn’s scrutiny, since his work extends to other fields. He studies other physical models connected with micromagnetism. Thus in the future, when hard discs of 100GB will already seem small, we are likely to find that a tiny magnetic device with an enormous storage capacity is in fact an offspring of Kohn’s researches.
It might seem like a joke to ask what a bridge made with the lightest and most modern materials has in common with the RAM memory of a computer. Kohn has found the answer, and it is not intended to have any double meaning designed to raise a chuckle. Rather it concerns the appearance of "geometric patterns" characterized by the repetition of certain geometric configurations whose length is much less than the macroscopic scale of the object under consideration. These geometric structures are reproduced periodically, pseudo-periodically and in a more complicated way.
The results of R. V. Kohn’s researches lead to a better understanding of the materials mentioned above and enable them to be studied in greater depth. And while they cannot yet be transformed into something real, it is quite likely that in the future we will have at our disposal a device impossible to imagine at present, which will be a direct descendent of one of this mathematician’s results.
Robert V. Kohn has studied mathematics at the most prestigious universities in the U.S.A. After graduating from Harvard, he studied for his Master’s degree at Warwick and subsequently obtained his doctorate in 1979 at Princeton. He is currently a professor at the Courant Institute at the University of New York.  In 1999, he was awarded the Ralph Kleinman Prize by the U.S.A. Society for Industry and Applied Mathematics (SIAM).
Speaker: Robert V. Kohn
Title: “Energy-Driven Pattern Formation”
Date: Saturday, August 26th. 09:00-10:00
ICM2006 Scientific Programme: http://www.icm2006.org/scientificprogram/plenarylectures/

Information on studies related to Robert V. Kohn’s research:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shape_memory_alloy
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martensite         
                                                               
（转自2006年国际数学家大会官方网站）