Professor Emeritus Jerry Ericksen Symposium to Celebrate his 90th Birthday

Professor Emeritus Jerry Ericksen

We are pleased to announce that Professor Emeritus Jerry Ericksen will celebrate his 90th birthday at a symposium in Eugene, Oregon on October 23-25, 2015. The Institute of Mathematics and its Applications workshop is called "Mathematics and Mechanics in the 22nd Century: Seven Decades and Counting." More details here.

This workshop will celebrate the 90th birthday of Jerry Ericksen by gathering several academic generations of researchers, to showcase the work of young researchers influenced by these developments and to explore future trajectories. It will also allow the younger research community to network with the senior one, with the long term goal of helping to overcome the challenges of accessing interdisciplinary research at the interface of mathematics, the sciences, and engineering.

Nonlinear elasticity emerged in the mathematical community as a result of the works by Ericksen and Rivlin, in the 1950s and 1960s. Ericksen's research gave a deep understanding of how principles of invariance served to identify special solutions. A landmark paper from Ericksen's body of work of this period delivers an explicit classification of all deformations possible in every incompressible nonlinear elastic material, regardless the specific form of the free energy function.

In the 1960s and 1970s work on liquid crystals by Frank Leslie and Jerry Ericksen gave rise to the now renowned dynamical theory of liquid crystals. In the late 1980s, Ericksen formulated a theory for liquid crystal polymers involving a variable degree of orientation. On the one hand, this work prompted new studies of flow instabilities in liquid crystals and their impact in polymer processing, and secondly, the regularizing role of the order parameter in the model initiated a new way to study defect dynamics. This in turn sparked a new interest in the mathematical community towards the analysis of the Landau­de Gennes model, based on an order tensor. These are just highlights of Professor Ericksen's successes. More details here.