In this talk, I will discuss some new results on intersection graphs of pseudo-segments in the plane and their applications in graph drawing.  These results are joint work with Jacob Fox and Janos Pach.
 

Micrometer-sized particles made from responsive polymer networks (that is, responsive microgel colloids) are of high potential for the design of functional soft materials due to their adaptive compressibility and stimuli-triggered volume transition. In this talk, I will discuss models and theoretical approaches, such as Langevin simulations and classical (dynamic) density functional theory (DFT), to describe the structural and dynamical behavior of dispersions of these responsive colloids in and out of equilibrium. Moreover, I will argue that chemical fueling and the inclusion of chemomechanical feedback loops may lead to excitable and oscillatory dynamics of the active colloids, establishing first steps to a well-controlled design of artificial cells and their emergent behavior.

Steklov eigenvalues are eigenvalues of the Dirichlet-to-Neumann operator which are introduced by Steklov in 1902 motivated by physics. And there is a deep connection between the extremal Steklov eigenvalue problems and the free boundary minimal surface theory in the unit Euclidean ball as revealed by Fraser and Schoen in 2016. In the talk, we will discuss the question of how rare simple Steklov eigenvalues are on manifolds and its applications in nodal sets and critical points of eigenfunctions.