The renowned Séminaire Bourbaki will feature research co-authored by Rob Kusner, professor of mathematics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, during its upcoming session at the Institut Henri Poincaré (IHP) in Paris on Saturday, November 29, 2025, at 10:00 a.m. CET. The talk—titled “Minimal surfaces via equivariant eigenvalue optimization, after Karpukhin–Kusner–McGrath–Stern”—will be delivered by Giada Franz, highlighting breakthroughs from a 2024 paper by Mikhail Karpukhin, Robert Kusner, Peter McGrath, and Daniel Stern.
The Bourbaki program notes that the lecture will survey new constructions of embedded minimal surfaces in the round three-sphere and free-boundary minimal surfaces in the unit three-ball, obtained by optimizing Laplace and Steklov eigenvalues under discrete symmetries. This approach resolves a central open problem posed by Fraser–Li (2014) for surfaces in the unit ball and yields rich families of examples across all topological types.
The Séminaire Bourbaki is a legendary series of expository lectures—founded in 1948 by the collective pseudonym “Nicolas Bourbaki”—that surveys major advances across all areas of modern mathematics. Held in Paris several times a year, each talk is delivered by an invited expert “after” (or après in French) the original authors, distilling breakthroughs into a unified, rigorous narrative for a broad mathematical audience. The written versions, known as exposés Bourbaki, are widely read and archived (notably in the Astérisque series).
For more on Prof. Kusner’s research areas in geometric analysis, low-dimensional topology, and the calculus of variations, please visit his faculty profile.