Conveners
Lecture 3: Meanders
- Philippe Di Francesco
Description
This lecture is devoted entirely to the "Problème des Timbres poste" or stamp-folding problem first posed by Emile Lemoine in 1891, revisited by Poincaré in 1912 in purely geometric terms and later rebaptized "meander problem" by Arnold in 1991. In the latter language, we wish to count inequivalent configurations of a non-self-intersecting road circuit crossing a straight infinite river through 2N bridges.
We show how the question relates to deep and fundamental problems in algebra and geometry, and how the physics theory of two-dimensional quantum gravity has allowed us to make remarkable predictions on the asymptotic count of meander configurations.
