l Home Page of Graeme Milton

Home Page of Graeme Milton


Distinguished Professor
Department of Mathematics
University of Utah
155 S 1400 E RM 233
Salt Lake City, Utah 84112


Office: JWB 310

Office phone: (801)581-6495
Phone messages: (801)581-6851
Fax: (801)581-4148

NOTE new E-mail: graeme.milton?utah.edu (alias for u0028185?utah.edu) ,

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Vita updated in December 2022

50 Most Significant Papers

Summary of Some Major Accomplishments

Publications since 2005, categorized by topic

List of publications by and about Graeme Milton with thanks to Nelson Beebe for producing it.

Google citations

Notable recognitions include a 1988 Sloan Fellowship , an inaugural 1988 Packard Fellowship , the 2003 Ralph E. Kleinman Prize of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics, the 2007 William Prager Medal of the Society for Engineering Science, the 2012 first competitive Rolf Landauer Medal of the International ETOPIM Association, and most recently the 2015 Levi-Civita Prize

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Some former/current postdocs with me and my husband, John Patton, at the Banff International Research Station:        

Postdocs at BIRS

Left to Right: Yury Grabovsky, Daniel Onofrei, Maxence Cassier, Ornella Mattei, John Patton, Myself, Christian Kern, and Fernando Guevara Vasquez. Missing are Johan Helsing, David Eyre, Sergei Serkov, Mohamed Camar-Eddine, and Davit Harutunyan. Also missing are former Ph.D Students Vincenzo Nesi, Karen Clark and Andrew Thaler.

Valid HTML 4.0!

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News :

My paper A Possible Explanation of Dark Matter and Dark Energy Involving a Vector Torsion Field has appeared as a refereed invited paper in the special issue Torsion-Gravity and Spinors in Fundamental Theoretical Physics with Fabbri Luca as guest editor. Could it explian the observed missing dark matter and dark energy in the universe? Time will tell. I have a strong conviction that if Einstein's gravitational theory in free space (vanishing of the Ricci tensor) is to be replaced then the new theory should be mathematically elegant and as simple as possible. The theory I propose meets those two criteria. It allows for the connection coefficients to be non-symmetric (i.e. it has a non-zero torsion field) and is based on the simple assumption that the two definitions of a geodesic coincide (the path having an extremum for the distance between two points and the line of transport of a vector parallel to itself), and that in free space the symmetrized Ricci tensor vanishes (to provide the needed number of equations for the unknown variables).

Kshiteej Deshmukh and myself proposed a new type of time interface in the paper An energy conserving mechanism for temporal metasurfaces.

Fernando Fraternali, Narinder Singh, Ada Amendola, Gianmario Benzoni and myself conceptualized a new design for earthquake isolators in the paper A biomimetic sliding–stretching approach to seismic isolation that was highlighted in the Nature article The 3D print job that keeps quake damage at bay : see the video A novel seismic isolator with an anthropomorphic character .

My 2002 book "The Theory of Composites" is now back in print as a SIAM Classics book in Applied Mathematics

Also, now available in its entirety in a no-print version here is the book Extending the Theory of Composites to Other Areas of Science, with four chapters coauthored with Maxence Cassier , Ornella Mattei , Moti Milgrom , and Aaron Welters ,

Extending the Theory of Composites to Other Areas of Science

kindly reviewed by Yury Grabovsky in SIAM Book Review and by Pradeep Sharma in Imechanica and in the Journal of Applied Mechanics To support low cost publication of research books, if you like the book please think about or ask your librarian to purchase a hardback copy. Only $80! Available here: Extending the Theory of Composites to Other Areas of Science

A snapshot of what is inside the book can be found in these slides

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I have just made available the latex template file containing what I find to be useful macros, producing a sample pdf. Also now available for download are the bibtex files tcbook.bib and newref.bib with many references related to my research. tcbook.bib are those in my book "The theory of composite materials. Nelson Beebe is thanked for his help with these files."

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Worth reading are a few SIAM News articles: New Horizons in the Study of Waves in Space-time Microstructures , joint with Ornella Mattei, (see also Paul Gabrielsen's news release and the video therein of Ornella Mattei.); Guiding Stress with Cable Networks and the Spider Web Problem , joint with Guy Bouchitt\'e, O. Mattei, and P. Seppecher; Pentamode Materials from Underwater Cloaking to Cushioned Sneakers, joint with Andrej Cherkaev, Muamer Kadic, and Martin Wegener; Anomalous Localized Resonance and Associated Cloaking, joint with Ross McPhedran; Surprises Regarding the Hall Effect: An Extraordinary Story Involving an Artist, Mathematicians, and Physicists , joint with Marc Briane, Muamer Kadic, Christian Kern, Martin Wegener, and Dylon Whyte. The latter followed Johanne Miller's cover story of Physics Today , the main Physics magazine         Interlocking ring structure

see also the Nature News and Views Nature Article of Masaya Notomi.

The group of Martin Wegener produced the World's first Hall-coefficient reversal material, in the paper Experimental Evidence for Sign Reversal of the Hall Coefficient in Three-Dimensional Metamaterials based on a simplification of an interlocking ring design that in the papers Homogenization of the three-dimensional Hall effect and change of sign of the Hall-coefficient ( Hal.archives Version ) and Reversal of the Hall coefficient sign under homogenization , Marc Briane and I proved would reverse the Hall-effect back in 2007. This result (called by Wegener's group a "mind-boggling prediction") overturns the notion, found in many textbooks, that the Hall coefficient tells one the sign of the charge carrier. Inspiration for the geometry came from the chainmail artist Dylon Whyte and from joint work with Vincenzo Nesi. With D. Manceau we proved the reversal is impossible in two-dimensions. We also discovered the Parallel Hall Effect where the induced electric field is parallel to the magnetic field, and Wegener's group numerically and experimentally verified this too, with a simpler microstructure.

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Our work on ideal climbing ropes (also available on ArXiv ) made it to the front cover of climbing magazine . Direct link here . A once in a lifetime achievement!

See also the news release of Lee Siegel

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See the news release by Paul Gabrielsen describing our work on analytic materials, New math tools for new materials , and the accompanying paper also available on ArXiv. This paper also reviews other exact solutions in inhomogeneous media and the subject of metamaterials, providing a proper historical perspective.

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See below some of the many articles related to our work on cloaking. It could be that our 2006 paper On the cloaking effects associated with anomalous localized resonance (submitted in October 2005, preceding the cloaking papers of Leonhardt and Pendry, Schurig, and Smith ) was the first to introduce the word "cloaking" into the scientific literature, outside computer science. With 12,815 downloads our paper Quasistatic cloaking of two-dimensional polarizable discrete systems by anomalous resonance was the most downloaded paper in 2007 amongst all 12 journals of the Optical Society of America.

  • 'Cloaking device' idea proposed.
  • Scientists gain insight into invisibility through a complex superlens.
  • Site Unseen.
  • Now you see it, now you don't: cloaking device is not just sci-fi
  • Close encounters of the cloaking kind: now you see it, now you don't
  • Scientists moot Romulan-style cloaking device
  • Scientists working to make objects invisible.
  • Scientists set sights on invisibility cloaks.
  • Hiding behind Hermite polynomials (AMS Math in the media, October 2009)
  • Mathematics of a Novel Type of Active Cloaking.
  • Cloaking Device Concept Moves Beyond Theory.
  • Cloaking Technology May Protect From Natural Disasters.
  • A New Cloaking Method: This is not a 'Star Trek' or 'Harry Potter' Story (w/ Video).
  • The inaudibility cloak first to submarines (Finnish).
  • Hidden from view.
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    See the articles below related to pentamode materials a new class of material that we devised in the 1995 paper Which Elasticity Tensors are Realizable? also available here In 2012, before they built pentamodes the group of Wegener in the paper, ''Tailored 3D Mechanical Metamaterials Made by Dip-in Direct-Laser-Writing Optical Lithography'' wrote: ''In addition, the ''holy grail'' of mechanical materials, namely pentamode materials, that can be seen as the mother of all materials, might become accessible as well. Pentamodes, suggested by Milton and Cherkaev in 1995, are solids that behave like fluids with a very small effective shear modulus.'' Pentamodes can be made anisotropic and in this way one gets a new sort of "anisotropic liquid", that instead of supporting a hydrostatic loading, supports a loading that is a combination of hydrostatic compression and shear, but is compliant to loadings in the orthogonal five-dimensional subspace of the 6-dimensional space of symmetric 3 by 3 matrices.

  • NKIT Researchers Succeed in Realizing a New Material Class
  • New material class developed: Pentamode metamaterial
  • Elastic Cloaking Material Makes Objects "Unfeelable"
  • This New Material Makes Things 'Invisible' To Touch!
  • Making Science Fiction A Reality: The Pentamode Metamaterial!
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  • An article by Habib Ammari in La Recherche highlighting our resolution of the Polya-Szego conjecture
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    Below is a figure from our landmark paper Optical and dielectric properties of partially resonant composites (with the most relevant text being highlighted) that marked the discovery of anomalous resonance and ghost sources

    (see also the introduction of a draft paper Unusual resonant phenomena where ghost image charges appear in the matrix doi:10.13140/RG.2.1.1477.5283).

    Figure 3 in paper Optical and dielectric properties of partially resonant composites,

    This later turned out to be the essential mechanism for explaining the so-called superlenses or perfect lenses, for which Sir John Pendry received the Kavli Prize. . In fact the structure we were analysing would now be called a quasistatic ("poor mans") magnifying superlens, and indeed we discovered it magnified the core. Interestingly as shown in the paper Interestingly as shown in the paper Opaque perfect lenses for a point dipole source turned on within a distance d/2 of a "perfect lens" of thickness d and emitting constant power the long-time transmission is zero not one! All the power gets pumped into the anomalously resonant fields. In fact the source does not radiate behind the lens either: this is an example of cloaking due to anomalous resonance, first discovered in the paper On the cloaking effects associated with anomalous localized resonance. For some insight into the history of anomalous resonance see the SIAM news article Anomalous Localized Resonance and Associated Cloaking

    We were the first to discover ghost sources, not Sir John Pendry

    The literature and websites abound with explanations and figures that purport to explain superlensing of a point source without mentioning anomalous resonance. This is absurd since it is the anomalous resonance that sets the scale of resolution. Anomalous resonance is more than just a surface plasmon: it has the characteristic feature that the region of anomalous resonance depends on the source location, and that as the loss goes to zero the fields converge to a smooth field outside this region, but blow up to infinity with increasingly rapid oscillations inside the region. Whereas normal resonance is connected with poles of a response function anomalous resonance is connected with essential singularities (see Section 5 in Transport Properties of a Three-Phase Composite Material: The Square Array of Coated Cylinders and Section 5 in Spectral Theory of a Neumann–Poincaré-Type Operator and Analysis of Cloaking Due to Anomalous Localized Resonance ). Anomalous resonance, and the associated cloaking, can also occur in magnetoelectric and thermoelectric systems and elastic systems (see here and here ). Hoai-Minh Nguyen proved cloaking of an arbitrary object via anomalous localized resonance . Cloaking due to anomalous resonance is also associated with folded geometries where one has say the shell radius smaller than the core radius and transforms to an equivalent problem with the shell radius bigger than the core radius (see here and here ). In these folded geometries, unlike in the folded geometry suggested by Leonhardt and Philbin, there are three manifolds in the folded region.

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    Translation, thanks to my Russian friends, of Dolin's 1961 Paper, that marks the birth of Transformation Optics

    To the possibility of comparison of three-dimensional electromagnetic systems with nonuniform anisotropic filling

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    Talk slides, including some talks given by my coauthors

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    Bio

    Graeme Milton was born in Sydney, Australia, in the beautiful beach town of Manly . He received outstanding public education at the Wahroonga Bush School , Kur-ring-gai and Killarney Heights High Schools getting 7th place in the State High School Mathematics exam. Following this, he obtained an undergraduate and Master's degree in Physics at the University of Sydney where he had the distinction of receiving the University Medal with the lowest grade point average. His undergraduate honors' thesis, Theoretical studies of the transport properties of inhomogeneous media, under the direction of Ross McPhedran , introduced him to the field of composite materials, resulting in the publication Bounds on the complex dielectric constant of a composite material that received more reprint requests than any of his subsequent papers (in the days when people mailed reprint request cards). He did his Ph.D thesis Some Exotic Models in Statistical Physics at Cornell University Physics Department with Michael E. Fisher . Following this he did a postdoc with Michael Cross at Caltech as a Weingart Fellow. George Papanicolaou suggested he apply for an assistant professorship at the Courant Institute, where he got tenure and was promoted to Associate Professor after two years to Associate Professor, and later to Full Professor. However, the attraction of the outdoors (downhill and cross-country skiing, hiking, mountain biking, and road biking) in spectacular Utah pulled him, with the help of Ken Golden , Paul Fife , and Benny Rushing , to the University of Utah Mathematics Department, where in 1999 he became Distinguished Professor, and served as department chair from 2002-2005 . He is especially grateful for the mentoring he received during his career.