Topology Seminar for 2/13/2003

Feng Luo
Rutgers University

We show that the analog of Hamilton's Ricci flow in the combinatorial setting produces solutions which converge exponentially fast to Thurston's circle packing on surfaces. As a consequence, a new proof of Thurston's existence of circle packing theorem is obtained. As another consequence, Ricci flow suggests a new algorithm to find circle packings. This is a joint work with Ben Chow.