This thesis is a study of wave maps from a curved background to the standard two dimensional sphere S2. The target is always assumed to be embedded in R3 in the standard way. The do- main manifold (the "curved background") will be diffeomorphic to S2 × R, ...
What is the longest rope on the unit sphere? Intuition tells us that the answer to this packing problem depends on the rope's thickness. For a countably infinite number of prescribed thickness values we construct and classify all solution curves. The simpl ...
We consider the variational problem of finding the longest closed curves of given minimal thickness on the unit sphere. After establishing the existence of solutions for any given thickness between 0 and 1, we explicitly construct for each given thickness ...