Schmidt, Georg

Research Interests

My research interests lie in problems which are analytic in character but have a physical context. My doctoral thesis (written under the supervision of Ralph Phillips at Stanford) dealt with the scattering of electromagnetic waves by an obstacle. Later I worked for some years on potential scattering for the Schroedinger equation. Subsequently I started working on control problems in which boundary data for initial, boundary value problems for partial differential equations are to be chosen so that the solutions have some desired behaviour. I first worked with the heat equation, later turning to hyperbolic equations and particularly systems of hyperbolic equations governing the vibrations in mechanical structures which may consist of many coupled elements. In recent years I have worked on the controlled motion of mechanical systems from equilibrium in one location to equilibrium at another location. Currently I have also become interested in the control and stabilization of flows through networks of canals. The tools I use come from the theory of partial differential equations and functional analysis: in particular hyperbolic systems, semigroup theory, variational methods and implicit function theorems.

Publications