Student Analysis Seminar

The Einstein equations are a system of PDE governing the curvature of a pseudo-Riemannian manifold. It is natural to ask if these equations have a formulation as an initial value problem, and if they can be solved in this context. In this talk we will discuss Choquet-Bruhat's work on the subject, covering the main steps in her argument proving existence and uniqueness results for the vacuum Einstein equations given appropriate initial data. We will briefly review relevant definitions from differential geometry. Speaker(s): Christopher Stith (University of Michigan)