Beecroft Building, Department of Physics
Professor L Mahadevan, Harvard
Morphogramming: geometry, physics and technology
How can we design shape (for function)? Professor L. Mahadevan, Harvard, will describe a class of inverse problems in physical geometry inspired by this simple question in a few different settings. These include kirigami tilings for planar and three-dimensional shapes, origami tessellations for complex curved surfaces, and printing and growing strategies to create flowers and faces, using a combination of experimental, computational and theoretical approaches. Along the way he will show how we can also control the energy landscape of the resulting set of shapes by varying the connectivity of the underlying unit cells that allows us to go from completely floppy networks to rigid structures and even totimorphs - structures that have an infinite range of energetically equivalent shapes.
As part of the Lamb Lectures, Professor L Mahadevan is also giving a public lecture on 10 June 2023: The wisdom of the swarm: physics and behaviour and another technical lecture on 12 June 2023: Morphogenesis: geometry, physics and biology.