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  • About
  • The Global ETD Search service is a free service for researchers to find electronic theses and dissertations. This service is provided by the Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations.
    Our metadata is collected from universities around the world. If you manage a university/consortium/country archive and want to be added, details can be found on the NDLTD website.
1

Geodesics of Random Riemannian Metrics

LaGatta, Tom January 2010 (has links)
We introduce Riemannian First-Passage Percolation (Riemannian FPP) as a new model of random differential geometry, by considering a random, smooth Riemannian metric on R^d . We are motivated in our study by the random geometry of first-passage percolation (FPP), a lattice model which was developed to model fluid flow through porous media. By adapting techniques from standard FPP, we prove a shape theorem for our model, which says that large balls under this metric converge to a deterministic shape under rescaling. As a consequence, we show that smooth random Riemannian metrics are geodesically complete with probability one.In differential geometry, geodesics are curves which locally minimize length. They need not do so globally: consider great circles on a sphere. For lattice models of FPP, there are many open questions related to minimizing geodesics; similarly, it is interesting from a geometric perspective when geodesics are globally minimizing. In the present study, we show that for any fixed starting direction v, the geodesic starting from the origin in the direction v is not minimizing with probability one. This is a new result which uses the infinitesimal structure of the continuum, and for which there is no equivalent in discrete lattice models of FPP.

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