Wednesday 29 April 2026 at 4:45 pm, as part of the Insalate di Matematica seminar cycle, Lorenzo Maniscalco (Università of Torino) will give the following talk
Title: When Electrostatics meets Lorentzian Geometry: the Born-Infeld equation
Abstract: A well-known feature of Maxwell's electrodynamics is that a static point charge generates a field whose static energy is infinite. This is physically unsatisfactory, and in fact in the 1930s Born and Infeld proposed an alternative classical theory of the electromagnetic interaction that overcomes this issue. The drawback is that the new theory is non-linear, making it mathematically much more involved. In this talk I will focus on the electrostatics of the Born–Infeld theory, explaining why it is a challenging problem from the perspective of regularity theory and how it is closely related to the geometry of spacelike hypersurfaces in spacetime.
Keywords: Prescribed Lorentzian mean curvature, Born–Infeld model, Euler–Lagrange equation, Regularity of solutions, Measure data.
Information to attend
The seminar will be held in Room U9-09 (U9 Building | Viale dell’Innovazione 10, Milano) and will also be available online by this link (password: insalate, 46725283 from phones).
For more information, visit the website