Who discovered and analysed geometrical objects such as the square and the circle? According to several studies, geometry started in Egypt. The seasonal flooding of the Nile led farmers to measure the areas in order to know which plot of land belonged to each farmer after the floods receded. Geometry (from the Greek ‘geo’, earth and ‘metrein’, to measure), is the branch from Mathematics which studies the properties of space, and Isabel Fernández Delgado, a researcher from the department of Geometry and Topology of the Universidad de Granada has written her own chapter in the history of this science.
Fernánder Delgado is the author of the doctoral thesis ‘Maximal surfaces with isolated singularities’, a work which, for the first time, has made a systematic study of the space of these elements.
The average curvature of maximal surfaces is always zero. Although this is an abstract concept, it appears in what in Geometry is known as «Lorentzian spaces», which have not only physical coordinates (spatial) but also temporal ones. These spaces are often used as models of the theory of relativity.
The researcher thoroughly examined the behaviour of these particular surfaces in the infinite, classified them, and gave them a representation theorem. “Our study has examined how these surfaces would react to slight disruptions–that is to say, for example, when we modify the position of the singularities”, explains Fernández Delgado.
Furthermore, the author of this thesis has analysed the surfaces which repeat infinitely in space, representing them using a complex computer programme.
Reference:
Isabel Fernández Delgado. Department of Geometry and Topology of the Universidad de Granada. Phone number: 958 24 29 26. Email address: isafer@ugr.es
