Funny — I e-mailed the message below 21 minutes before another word (that mentions the Stack Exchange discussion). The other one arrived 1 minute after sending it; this one took 32 minutes to arrive. What could explain such a big discrepancy? As far as I know the identical e-addresses were involved in both messages. —Dan
On Jan 4, 2016, at 11:46 AM, Dan Asimov <asimov@msri.org> wrote:
I think such a surface would likely resemble a monkey saddle, since it seems to have the same symmetry.
It's not clear to me that there is a unique minimal surface, or perhaps two congruent ones neither of which include the centroid.
But there is software developed by Ken Brakke called the Surface Evolver that is designed to calculate (and draw, with an external drawing program) minimal surfaces with a given boundary, and related optimization problems: