Plateau's problem
Problema de Plateau
- Date
- 1873 (planteamiento) / 1930-1931 (resolución) · confidence medium
- Place
- Ghent, East Flanders, Belgium
- Credited to
- Joseph Plateau (posed from his soap-film experiments); solved mathematically by Jesse Douglas and Tibor Radó
- Field
- Knowledge & symbols
⚠️ Disputed: the sources disagree.
What was discovered
The problem of proving the existence of a minimal surface with a given boundary, posed from Joseph Plateau's soap-film experiments and independently solved by Jesse Douglas and Tibor Radó.
The Wikidata entry attributes the problem to Lagrange, but it is named after Joseph Plateau, who posed it from his 1873 soap-film experiments; the existence of the minimal surface was proved by Jesse Douglas and Tibor Radó in 1930-1931.
What it led to
- advanced the calculus of variations and geometric measure theory
- earned Jesse Douglas the first Fields Medal, in 1936
- applied to the design of tensile structures and membranes