Michael Kiessling – Rutgers University
Date/Time/Location
Thursday, October 30th, 2025, 12:10 pm; Hill Center 705
Rigorous and numerical results on atomic clusters
I am presenting some recent joint work with the chemist David Wales concerning atomic (and molecular) clusters. Cluster research has raised some important questions, yet so far only a few have been answered rigorously. In fact, some open mathematical cluster problems have been proved to be really hard, NP-hard to be precise. All the same, there are some conjectures informed by computer simulations and theoretical plausibility reasoning that suggest that at least some significant progress on some of the open problems is feasible.