TECHNICAL TALK on Spinning Tennis Rackets, Parking Cars and Falling Cats The Lovely World of Geometry

#css-ims #spinning #drones #technical #kolkata
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ABOUT THE LECTURE
What happens when familiar Euclidean geometry is placed on a sphere?
From falling cats and spinning tennis rackets to parking cars, astronauts and agile drones, geometry and symmetry quietly govern
motion all around us.
This lecture offers an intuitive journey into the beautiful geometry hidden behind these everyday phenomena. 


  Date and Time

  Location

  Hosts

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  • Seminar Hall
  • Jadavpur University
  • Kolkata, West Bengal
  • India 700032
  • Building: Electrical Engineering
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  • Co-sponsored by Electrical Engineering Department, Jadavpur University

  Speakers

Prof R Banavar

Topic:

Spinning tennis rackets, parking cars and falling cats: The Lovely World of Geometry

Abstract:
 
"The sum of the squares of the lengths of the sides of a right angle is equal to the square of the hypotenuse." We learn Pythagoras by heart, and we regurgitate the statement on answer sheets  in closed exam halls and venues. But what if this right-angled triangle is pasted and fitted onto the surface of a sphere ? What would we see ? Would our perceptions change ? How would  the world appear if we kept moving on a sphere ? From falling cats to parallel parking cars to spinning tennis rackets to manoeuvring astronauts to agile drones, geometry and symmetry governs us everywhere. It is lurking behind all these phenomena - a few natural and a few engineered. If we realized this, our joy of learning science and engineering would increase many fold. The irony is that this visually appealing and aesthetically-pleasing geometry is often hidden behind its symbolic manifestation - mathematical machinery, formulae and notation. In this talk I shall describe many such phenomena and gently and mildly introduce the geometry behind them. 

Biography:

Ravi N. Banavar is currently a Professor in Systems and Control Engineering at IIT Bombay. He received his B.Tech. in Mechanical Engineering from IIT Madras (1986), his Masters (Mechanical, 1988) and Ph.D. (Aerospace, 1992) degrees from Clemson University and the University of Texas at Austin, respectively. He had a brief teaching stint at UCLA during 1991–92, soon after which he joined the Systems and Control Engineering group at IIT Bombay in early 1993. From 2009 to 2015, he chaired the Systems and Control group. He has spent a few sabbatical breaks at UCLA (Los Angeles), IISc (Bangalore), IIT Gandhinagar, and LSS (Supelec, France.)  He currently holds a Guest Professorship in IIT Gandhinagar. He was an Associate Editor of the Elsevier journal, Systems and Control Letters from 2013 to 2025,   he is currently an Associate Editor of the Elsevier, IFAC journal, Automatica,  as also being on the Editorial Advisory Board of the Taylor and Francis publication, The International Journal of Control, and a Technical Associate Editor of the IEEE Control Systems Society magazine. His current research interests lie in: Optimal control on Lie Groups, geometric mechanics, nonlinear systems, data-driven control, discretization of dynamical systems on manifolds, consensus and coordination problems on Lie groups with applications to mechanical and aerospace systems, geometric observer design on Lie groups with applications in robotics and inertial navigation. English literature, music, swimming and history are his other loves. He spends most of his time with his students, and is happy discussing any issue or sorting out their problems.