24 March – Michele: “Boys don’t cry, Lie groups don’t lie”

Many differential equations of practical interest evolve on Lie groups or on manifolds acted upon by Lie groups. The retention of Lie-group structure under discretisation is often vital in the recovery of qualitatively-correct geometry and dynamics and in the minimisation of numerical error. In this talk I will introduce the audience to the more common numerical integrators that preserve this features and state some of the most important results about their accuracy and convergence. Time (and Matlab) permitting, I will also talk about why am I studying this numerical schemes and what I’ve been trying to achieve so far.