Friday, February 22 2019, 2:30pm Boyd Room 304 Armin Schikorra Title: Self-repulsive curvature energies for curves and surfaces: regularity theory and relation to harmonic maps Abstract: I will talk about a class of curvature energies for curves, the O'Hara energies, that are nonlocal in nature. In particular, I will present an approach for regularity theory of minimizers and critical points for these curves which is based on a relation to (fractional) harmonic maps. Then I will present some results towards attempts of generalizing this idea to surfaces, where in particular a choice of parametrization comes into play.