Speaker: Joe Gerver (Rutgers)
Title: Non-collision singularities in the n-body problem: history and recent progress
Abstract: In the 1890′s, Poincare asked whether, in the n-body problem with point masses and Newtonian gravitation, it is possible to have a singularity without a collision. This might happen, for example, if one or more bodies were to oscillate wildly, like the function sin (1/t). We will go over the history of this problem for the past 120 years, including some recent developments.