Minimal surface in the context of Global optimum

Patterns in nature are visible regularities of form found in the natural world. These patterns recur in different contexts and can sometimes be modelled mathematically. Natural patterns include symmetries, trees, spirals, meanders, waves, foams, tessellations, cracks and stripes. Early Greek philosophers studied pattern, with Plato, Pythagoras and Empedocles attempting to explain order in nature. The modern understanding of visible patterns developed gradually over time.

In the 19th century, the Belgian physicist Joseph Plateau examined soap films, leading him to formulate the concept of a minimal surface. The German biologist and artist Ernst Haeckel painted hundreds of marine organisms to emphasise their symmetry. Scottish biologist D'Arcy Thompson pioneered the study of growth patterns in both plants and animals, showing that simple equations could explain spiral growth. In the 20th century, the British mathematician Alan Turing predicted mechanisms of morphogenesis which give rise to patterns of spots and stripes. The Hungarian biologist Aristid Lindenmayer and the French American mathematician Benoît Mandelbrot showed how the mathematics of fractals could create plant growth patterns.

The helicoid, also known as helical surface, is a smooth surface embedded in three-dimensional space. It is the surface traced by an infinite line that is simultaneously being rotated and lifted along its fixed axis of rotation. It is the third minimal surface to be known, after the plane and the catenoid.

In mathematics, the mean curvature ${\displaystyle H}$ of a surface ${\displaystyle S}$ is an extrinsic measure of curvature that comes from differential geometry and that locally describes the curvature of an embedded surface in some ambient space such as Euclidean space.

The concept was used by Sophie Germain in her work on elasticity theory, published 1831. Jean Baptiste Marie Meusnier used it in 1776, in his studies of minimal surfaces. It is important in the analysis of minimal surfaces, which have mean curvature zero, and in the analysis of physical interfaces between fluids (such as soap films) which, for example, have constant mean curvature in static flows, by the Young–Laplace equation.

Geometric analysis is a mathematical discipline where tools from differential equations, especially elliptic partial differential equations (PDEs), are used to establish new results in differential geometry and differential topology. The use of linear elliptic PDEs dates at least as far back as Hodge theory. More recently, it refers largelyto the use of nonlinear partial differential equations to study geometric and topological properties of spaces, such as submanifolds of Euclidean space, Riemannian manifolds, and symplectic manifolds. This approach dates back to the work by Tibor Radó and Jesse Douglas on minimal surfaces, John Forbes Nash Jr. on isometric embeddings of Riemannian manifolds into Euclidean space, work by Louis Nirenberg on the Minkowski problem and the Weyl problem, and work by Aleksandr Danilovich Aleksandrov and Aleksei Pogorelov on convex hypersurfaces. In the 1980s fundamental contributions by Karen Uhlenbeck, Clifford Taubes, Shing-Tung Yau, Richard Schoen, and Richard Hamilton launched a particularly exciting and productive era of geometric analysis that continues to this day. A celebrated achievement was the solution to the Poincaré conjecture by Grigori Perelman, completing a program initiated and largely carried out by Richard Hamilton.

In mathematics, the Legendre transformation (or Legendre transform), first introduced by Adrien-Marie Legendre in 1787 when studying the minimal surface problem, is an involutive transformation on real-valued functions that are convex on a real variable. Specifically, if a real-valued multivariable function is convex on one of its independent real variables, then the Legendre transform with respect to this variable is applicable to the function.

In physical problems, the Legendre transform is used to convert functions of one quantity (such as position, pressure, or temperature) into functions of the conjugate quantity (momentum, volume, and entropy, respectively). In this way, it is commonly used in classical mechanics to derive the Hamiltonian formalism out of the Lagrangian formalism (or vice versa) and in thermodynamics to derive the thermodynamic potentials, as well as in the solution of differential equations of several variables.

In geometry, a catenoid is a type of surface, arising by rotating a catenary curve about an axis (a surface of revolution). It is a minimal surface, meaning that it occupies the least area when bounded by a closed space. It was formally described in 1744 by the mathematician Leonhard Euler.

Soap film attached to twin circular rings will take the shape of a catenoid. Because they are members of the same associate family of surfaces, a catenoid can be bent into a portion of a helicoid, and vice versa.