Stephen Lynch

Singularities in mean curvature flow

Mean curvature flow moves a hypersurface in Euclidean space with velocity equal to its mean curvature vector. This evolution is described by a nonlinear weakly parabolic system. Variationally, it is a formal gradient flow for the volume functional. Solutions to mean curvature flow exhibit a huge variety of different kinds of singularities. For solutions which move monotonically (have nowhere vanishing mean curvature), however, these singularities exhibit enough structure so that they might eventually be completely classified. We will discuss the now essentially complete picture for surfaces in R^3 developed over the last 40 years, and then explore the dramatically more complicated setting of 3-dimensional hypersurfaces in R^4.