Summary
This award is funded in whole or in part under the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 (Public Law 117-2). Non-convex and singularly perturbed optimization methods are ubiquitous in the mathematical modeling of complex mechanical systems, and the questions addressed in this project - on stress focusing in confined membranes, and shape change in mechanical metamaterials - are at the cutting edge of nonlinear mechanics and the calculus of variations. The work is interdisciplinary, and success will come from blending techniques from engineering and physics with pure mathematical analysis. Rigorous o
