I STREINU (Smith)

Auxetic materials have the unusual property of expanding, rather than contracting, when stretched in a particular direction. We present and illustrate a purely geometric deformation theory of expansive and auxetic behavior for periodic frameworks in Euclidean spaces of arbitrary dimension. A rich supply of designs is provided by planar periodic pseudo-triangulations, whose expansive behavior is proven via a periodic analog of Maxwell's theorem on liftings and stresses. This is joint work with Ciprian Borcea. Speaker Bio: Ileana Streinu is the Charles N. Clark Professor of Computer Science and Mathematics at Smith College, in Northampton, Massachusetts. Currently, she is a 2018-2019 Radcliffe Fellow at Harvard University. Her research interests include discrete and computational geometry, rigidity theory, matroids and graph theory and extend into interdisciplinary directions, ranging from origami and robotics to the emerging field of BioGeometry. Prof. Streinu is an inaugural class Fellow of the American Mathematical Society and the recipient of the 2010 Robbins Prize of the AMS.