Luke Rogers
Department of Mathematics
196 Auditorium Rd,
University of Connecticut, U-3009
Storrs, CT 06269-3009
U.S.A.

rogers (the usual symbol) math (dot) uconn (dot) edu

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About Me

I am an Assistant Professor in the Mathematics Department at the University of Connecticut. In the past I have been an H.C. Wang Postdoc at Cornell University, a Lecturer in the Department of Mathematics at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, and a graduate student at Yale University. My mathematical interests include analysis on fractals, Sobolev spaces and quasiconformal mappings These have connections to harmonic analysis, potential theory, complex analysis and geometric measure theory. In addition to my academic work I am an avid rock-climber, occasional cyclist and hiker, and all-around outdoor enthusiast.

Research

My research interests are mostly related to analysis on spaces which lack smoothness properties. These spaces include Euclidean domains (and pieces of manifolds) which have highly irregular boundaries as well as spaces for which the intrinsic structure is very non-Euclidean.

There are several approaches to analysis to metric-measure spaces that do not have a Euclidean structure.  In order to get started one usually makes some assumptions that provide a large class of "well-behaved" functions.  Most of the work I have done recently is in what is usually called "Analysis on Fractals", though parts of it should perhaps more accurately be called "Analysis on Metric-Measure-Dirichlet spaces"or "Analysis on self-similar spaces".  In this approach one either constructs or assumes the existence of a Dirichlet form, which one should think of as being an abstract version of the L^2 norm of the Euclidean gradient, and therefore (by general considerations) a Laplacian operator.  The "well-behaved functions" one considers are those in the domain of the Dirichlet form (finite energy functions - a sort of Sobolev space), or in the domain of the Laplacian ("differentiable functions") or some power of the Laplacian ("smooth of some finite order").  One can then try to build a theory that parallels the usual calculus in Euclidean spaces for this class of functions and operators, as well as studying the associated differential and partial differential equations.  Eventually one would like to be able to analyze the behavior of solutions on spaces that approximate structures which occur in nature.  To give just one example, one could ask what solutions of the wave equation look like on a percolation network (such as a distribution of oil or gas in a rock formation); I emphasize that we are a long way from being able to give a good answer to this question!

This type of analysis involves a blend of harmonic analysis, potential theory, functional analysis and probability theory.  To get started one needs the Dirichlet form.  In the cases where the resulting potential theory will give point sets positive capacity (and therefore finite energy functions will be continuous) the form can be constructed as a limit of forms on graphs, which often gives a concrete way to compute with interesting functions.  This approach is especially useful on self-similar sets because self-similarity gives a relationship between the local and global analytic structures which is a little like that in Euclidean spaces (which are about as self-similar as it is possible to be!).  There are quite a lot of analytic results where some sort of self-similarity plays an important role, and several of my papers are on results of this type.  Once one leaves the self-similar setting many things become more difficult.  There are some things that can be done by purely functional analytic methods if one knows strong estimates for the heat kernel associated to the Dirichlet form (for example my paper with Strichartz and Teplyaev on Smooth Bumps contains a result of this type) but constructing Dirichlet forms and giving explicit descriptions of finite energy functions is much more difficult.

There are a lot of interesting problems in this area, so I will not try to mention all of them.  Among the things I am thinking about are geometric structures on metric-measure-Dirichlet spaces (in particular Riemannian structures associated to the form, as in my paper with Ionescu and Teplyaev on Derivations and Dirichlet forms) and the associated question of developing non-commutative geometries and eventually quantum field theories on self-similar spaces.  I am looking at several open problems about smooth functions and their properties on self-similar sets with resistance-type Dirichlet forms (and on their product spaces and on fractafolds constructed therefrom).  At the same time I am investigating the behavior of the metric in harmonic coordinates, existence of embeddings via eigenfunction coordinates (which is related to some questions in applied mathematics) and the nature of the maps between the resistance metric and harmonic coordinate metric (when it exists).  The overall goal here is to understand the extent to which analysis of this type is similar to the study of Sturm-Liouville problems associated to singular measures.  Finally I am working on some methods for the construction of Dirichlet forms on sets which do not fit within the existing theory.

For completeness, I should return to a point mentioned earlier, which is that there are other approaches to analysis on metric measure spaces. One important and well known one is introduced in the book "Analysis on metric spaces" by Juha Heinonen.  In this approach one assumes existence of a large class of rectifiable curves, from which it follows that the Lipschitz functions are a rich and interesting collection.  Pursuing this idea leads to a sort of first order calculus on the space. In general this is a different kind of theory than that in analysis on fractals, where there are often no rectifiable curves and the Lipschitz functions are not the natural class to consider.  However there are some results in the intersection between these two theories, and I believe that many more natural connections will become clear over time. I have not worked in this area recently, but my thesis work on Sobolev extension theorems is closely connected to it.

Some results

Sobolev Spaces and other spaces of "smooth" functions

My thesis work was about universal extension operators for Sobolev spaces, which are operators that extend functions from any Sobolev space on a domain (locally they are defined on any function that is locally integrable) to the corresponding Sobolev space on the ambient Euclidean space, with estimates. The main result of my thesis extended methods of E. Stein and P.W. Jones to show that a universal extension operator exists for Sobolev spaces on locally-uniform domains. If you are familiar with the "cone-condition" for boundary points of a domain, which is often assumed when studying boundary value problems, then you can think of locally uniform domains as a generalization in which there is a "twisting cone" at every boundary point. The basic example of a twisting cone is the region between two logarithmic spirals.

Subsequently I have generalized the results of my thesis to consider Sobolev spaces on domains satisfying a weaker condition that is more measure-theoretic than geometric. The condition is usually called Ahlfors (or Ahlfors-David) regularity. It says that if we take a ball of radius r (for r between 0 and 1) around any point in the domain, then the intersection of the ball and the domain has measure at least Cr^n. This condition has been shown to be necessary for the existence of a bounded linear extension operator by Hajlasz, Koskela and Tuominen. An earlier result of Rychkov shows that this is sufficient for the construction of Sobolev extensions of fixed order.

Analysis on fractals

Much of my work in this area is joint with Bob Strichartz (Cornell), and different projects have involved a number of other people, including Kasso Okoudjou (University of Maryland), Erin Pearse (U. of Iowa), Huojun Ruan ( Zhejiang U.), Alexander Teplyaev (U. of Connecticut) and Marius Ionescu (U. of Connecticut) as well as my undergraduate advisees Michael Barany (formerly at Cornell), Matthew Begue (formerly at UConn), Jessie DeGrado (formerly at Cornell), Tyler Reese (UConn).

One of the main problems we have addressed is related to the structure of smooth functions on certain fractal sets. This structure is very different to that of smooth functions on Euclidean spaces, not least because on fractals the product of smooth functions is almost never smooth! What we have been doing is constructing analogues of some tools of classical analysis (including smooth bump functions, partitions subordinate to open covers, distributions, etc.) in the fractal setting. These should be useful for studying differential equations on fractal structures.  So far we have quite complete results for the existence of smooth bump functions on metric measure spaces, and have a solution to the smooth partitioning problem in the post-critically finite (p.c.f.) case. This lets us define distributions on p.c.f. fractals and establish their basic properties,as well as study pseudo-differential operators of various kinds. The tools involved in the proofs are both analytic and probabilistic.

A group of us also investigated a constructive approach to the resolvent kernel for the Laplacian on p.c.f. self-similar sets. We were able to give a series description of this kernel in which the terms are rescaled and localized copies of functions that satisfy an eigenfunction equation on the interior of the fractal. This work is related to earlier results I obtained with Jessie DeGrado and Bob Strichartz, which allow the computation of the harmonic gradients introduced by Teplyaev in the case of the Sierpinski Gasket.  I subsequently proved some estimates which allow this approach to be applied to infinite blowups of these fractals and which generalize known bounds for the resolvent to the complex plane with the negative real axis removed.

I have a number of other papers on related topics, including

Modulation Spaces, multipliers and PDE

Modulation spaces are spaces of functions with a some phase space localization measured by the modulation norm. As such they are well adapted to studying the evolution of the phase space structure of solutions of partial differential equations. It is well known that L^2 quantities can be used to describe energies, and many well-known PDE (eg the wave equation) have a conservation of energy property expressible in these terms. On the other hand, L^p properties for p different than 2 are not usually conserved. Instead one may wish to look at phase-space localization as expressed using the modulation space norm. The results for unimodular multipliers (including those for the wave and Schroedinger equations) are in a paper I collaborated on with Arpad Benyi, Kasso Okoudjou and Karlheinz Grochenig. This is the initial step for a number of projects related to modulation spaces and PDE.


Teaching

Current courses

This semester I am teaching Math 5110: Introduction to Modern Analysis and Math 3094: Analysis on Fractals.

Past courses

At the University of Connecticut

At Cornell University

At Stony Brook University

At Yale University

Over several semesters I taught the entire calculus sequence at Yale, some courses more than once.



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