Padua will host the International Conference celebrating the 100th anniversary of the Unione Matematica Italiana from May 23 to 27 while commemorating 800 years since the foundation of the University of Padua. On this occasion, Unipd welcomes Alessio Figalli, to discuss his work on the Ubiquity of optimal transport.
At the end of the eighteenth century, Gaspard Monge introduced optimal transport theory to understand the most efficient way to allocate resources from one place to another meant to build fortifications in such a way as to optimise defensive arrangements. Leonid Kantorovich continued to work on the optimal allocation of scarce resources throughout the 1940s, which led to him receiving a Nobel Prize in Economics in 1975.
Over the 30 years, optimal transport theory has found various applications to solve problems, both mathematical and of a more applied nature, including a method to study fluids and their particles. Alessio Figalli applied the theory to cloud formation, while others have used it to study crystals subjected to various temperatures. Optimal transport theory is a tool that optimises the transportation of objects but is applied to more abstract things, such as the pixels of a photograph or understanding how images are processed. The application of the theory to mathematical abstraction is an unexpected outcome from its original objective. The conference is an opportunity to explain this theory and some of its most relevant applications.
Professor of Mathematics at the ETH Federal Polytechnic in Zurich, Alessio Figalli is the 2018 Fields Medal recipient “For contributions to the theory of optimal transport and its applications in partial differential equations, metric geometry and probability.” His work in optimal transport theory is applicable in fields such as crystallography, meteorology, and more recently artificial intelligence. The International Mathematical Union awards the Fields Medal every 4 years to mathematicians under the age of 40 who have made fundamental contributions to the evolution of the discipline.
Registrations are closed.
The event will be also streamed online.