Abstract: In this talk, I begin with a review of different geometric flows (PDEs) including mean curvature (curve shortening) flow, surface diffusion flow, Willmore flow, etc., which arise from materials science, interface dynamics in multi-phase flows, biology membrane, computer graphics, geometry, etc. Different mathematical formulations and numerical methods for mean curvature flow are then discussed. In particular, an energy-stable linearly implicit parametric finite element method (PFEM) is presented in details. Then the PFEM is extended to surface diffusion flow and anisotropic surface diffusion flow, and a structure-preserving implicit PFEM is proposed. Finally, sharp interface models and their PFEM approximations are presented for solid-state dewetting. This talk is based on joint works with Harald Garcke, Wei Jiang, Yifei Li, Robert Nuernberg, Yan Wang and Quan Zhao.
Bio: Professor Weizhu BAO is a Professor at Department of Mathematics, National University of Singapore (NUS). He got his PhD from Tsinghua Univeristy in 1995 and afterwards he had postdoc and faculty positions at Tsinghua University, Imperial College in UK, Georgia Institute of Technology and University of Wisconsin at Madison in USA. He joined NUS as an Assistant Professor in 2000 and was promoted to Professor in 2009. He had been appointed as the Provost's Chair Professorship at NUS during 2013--2016. His research interests include numerical methods for partial differential equations, scientific computing/numerical analysis, analysis and computation for problems from physics, chemistry, biology and engineering sciences. He has made significant contributions in modeling and simulation of Bose-Einstein condensation, solid-state dewetting and geometric PDEs; and in multiscale methods and analysis for highly oscillatory PDEs. He had been on the Editorial Board of SIAM Journal on Scientific Computing during 2009--2014 and is currently on the Editorial Board of SIAM Journal of Numerical Analysis. He was awarded the Feng Kang Prize in Scientific Computing by the Chinese Computational Mathematics Society in 2013. He has been invited to give plenary and/or invited talks in many international conferences including an Invited Speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians (ICM) in 2014. He was elected a Fellow of the American Mathematical Society (AMS Fellow), a Fellow of the Society of Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM Fellow) and a Fellow of Singapore National Academy of Science (SNAS Fellow) in 2022.
