January 30, 2014
Mathematics Colloquium lecture Jan. 30
Florent Baudier, Texas A&M University, will present "Nonlinear Geometries and Applications" as part of the mathematics department colloquium lecture series at 2:30 p.m. Thursday, Jan. 30, in 122 Cardwell Hall.
The abstract for the lecture is: It is quite remarkable that fundamental sub fields of quantum physics, theoretical computer science and pure mathematics share a common feature.
Indeed, numerous problems that arose in these fields rely at the theoretical level on a deep understanding of the geometric properties of certain metric spaces. For instance, small distortion embeddings of large but finite metric spaces into Banach spaces with an almost Euclidean geometry is a cornerstone in designing fast approximation algorithms. In this talk, we will discuss various nonlinear embedding problems between metric spaces and their applications. In particular, we will explain why the three seemingly quite different fields of geometric group theory, quantitative metric geometry, and Banach space geometry, are actually extremely interconnected.