Sticky Kakeya sets, and the sticky Kakeya conjecture

UBC/PIMS Young Faculty Award Lecture

To be held at ESB 2012 and on Zoom: https://ubc.zoom.us/j/68285564037?pwd=R2ZpLy9uc2pUYldHT3laK3orakg0dz09
Meeting ID: 682 8556 4037
Passcode: 636252

A Kakeya set is a compact subset of R^n that contains a unit line segment pointing in every direction. The Kakeya conjecture asserts that such sets must have dimension n. This conjecture is closely related to several open problems in harmonic analysis, and it sits at the base of a hierarchy of increasingly difficult questions about the behavior of the Fourier transform in Euclidean space.
There is a special class of Kakeya sets, called sticky Kakeya sets. Sticky Kakeya sets exhibit an approximate self-similarity at many scales, and sets of this type played an important role in Katz, Łaba, and Tao's groundbreaking 1999 work on the Kakeya problem. In this talk, I will discuss a special case of the Kakeya conjecture, which asserts that sticky Kakeya sets must have dimension n. I will discuss the proof of this conjecture in dimension 3. This is joint work with Hong Wang.

Note: There will be a reception in ESB 4133 from 2:30 pm - 3:00 pm