Speaker: 

Mr. Jacob Bernstein

Institution: 

MIT

Time: 

Thursday, December 4, 2008 - 5:00pm

Location: 

AP&M 6402 (UCSD)

Colding and Minicozzi have shown that if an embedded minimal disk in $B_R\subset\Real^3$ has large curvature then in a smaller ball, on a scale still proportional to $R$, the disk looks roughly like a piece of a helicoid. In this talk, we will see that near points whose curvature is relatively large the description can be made more precise. That is, in a neighborhood of such a point (on a scale $s$ proportional to the inverse of the curvature of the point) the surface is bi-Lipschitz to a piece of a helicoid. Moreover, the Lipschitz constant goes to 1 as $Rs$ goes to $\infty$ . This follows from Meeks and Rosenberg's result on the uniqueness of the helicoid of which, time permitting, we will discuss a new proof. Joint work with C. Breiner.