Prof. Alessio Figalli
Full Professor and FIM Director
ETH Zürich
25th January 2022 - 4:00 pm - 5:00 pm (GST)
Title: | Optimal transport: past, present, and future |
Abstract: | At the end of the 18th century, Gaspard Monge introduced the optimal transport problem to understand the most efficient way of transporting a distribution of material from one place to another to build fortifications. In the last 30 years, this theory has found various applications in many areas of mathematics. However, many recently, optimal transport has also become a very powerful tool in many areas of machine learning. In this talk, we will give an overview of optimal transport, with some selected applications. |
Bio: | Alessio Figalli earned his doctorate in 2007 under the supervision of Luigi Ambrosio at the Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa and Cédric Villani at the École Normale Supérieure de Lyon. He was a faculty in France (CNRS and Ecole Polytechnique) and the US (UT Austin), before moving to ETH Zürich in 2016 as a chaired professor. Since 2019 he is the director of the “FIM-Institute for Mathematical Research” at ETH Zürich. In 2018 he won the Fields Medal for “his contributions to the theory of optimal transport, and its application to partial differential equations, metric geometry, and probability”. |