MechScience: For mechanician & mechanical science

• Professor Jerrold E. Marsden

Carl F Braun Professor of Engineering and Control & Dynamical Systems, California Institute of Technology

Expertise

Mechanics, dynamics and control systems. Mechanical systems with symmetry analyzed using geometric, analytical, and computational techniques as well as dynamical systems, control theory, and bifurcation theory. Applications are made to a variety of engineering and spacecraft systems.

Research Areas

Jerrold Marsden is a professor of Control and Dynamical Systems at Caltech. He has done extensive research in the area of geometric mechanics, with applications to rigid body systems, fluid mechanics, elasticity theory, plasma physics, as well as to general field theory. His work in dynamical systems and control theory emphasizes how it relates to mechanical systems and systems with symmetry. He is one of the original founders in the early 1970's of reduction theory for mechanical systems with symmetry, which remains an active and much studied area of research today.

Nonholonomic Mechanics and Control(INTERNET SUPPLEMENT)

• Professor Joris Vankerschaver

I am a postdoc with Jerrold Marsden at CDS in Caltech. I'm a Fulbright fellow as well as a research assistant from the Research Foundation -- Flanders (FWO-Vlaanderen). Before that I completed my Ph.D. thesis at Ghent University (Belgium) at the Department of Mathematical Physics and Astronomy.
My current research interests include the following (in order of definiteness):
Geometric reduction for solid bodies in vortical flow;
Variational principles in field theory and Dirac structures;
Space/time adapating discretizations of field theories;
Everything else :-)
I am currently in the process of migrating to a new website. In the meantime, you can consult my old webpage for my publications and information about classes I teach and upcoming conferences.