Professor Elizabeth Mansfield from the School of Mathematics, Statistics and Actuarial Science (SMSAS) at Kent, provides an insight into her research finding new ways to apply Noether’s Theorem in simulations, in a recent Science News article.
The article titled, ‘In her short life mathematician Emmy Noether changed the face of physics’, explores the lasting impact of Noether’s work, including the new applications of her ideas and theorems in contemporary physics and mathematics.
Extract:
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Everyday physics relies on Noether’s theorem as well. The conservation laws it implies help to explain waves on the surface of the ocean and air flowing over an airplane wing.
Simulating such systems helps scientists make predictions — about weather patterns, vibrations of bridges or the effects of a nuclear blast, for example. Noether’s theorem doesn’t automatically apply in computer simulations, which simplify the world by slicing it up into small chunks of space and time. So programmers have to manually add in conservation laws for energy and momentum.
“They throw away all of the physics, and then they have to try and force it all back in somehow,” says mathematician Elizabeth Mansfield of the University of Kent in England.
But Mansfield has found new ways to make Noether’s theorem apply in simulations. She and colleagues have simulated a person beating a drum inside a simplified Stonehenge, determining how sound waves would wrap around the stone — while automatically conserving energy. Mansfield says her method, which she will present in September in London at a Noether celebration, could eventually be used to create simulations that behave more like the real world.
… Click here to read the full article.