Public Lecture Honoring Jim Simons
Thursday, April 30, 2026
Wolfensohn Hall | 5:00 p.m.

Breaking the Bubble: From the Brachistochrone to the Simons Cone
Camillo De Lellis, IBM von Neumann Professor, Institute for Advanced Study

From the fastest path down a ramp to the form of a soap film, the quest to find nature's most efficient shapes has driven centuries of mathematical discovery. This lecture will trace the history of the calculus of variations, translating its most important concepts into everyday terms. The journey culminates with Jim Simons' groundbreaking paper on minimal cones, which showed that the familiar physical rules of everyday bubbles dramatically break down in higher dimensions and paved the way for the ultimate resolution of a decades-old mathematical mystery.

Register below to attend.