Abstract：
I will discuss two proofs of the celebrated Monge-Kantorovich theorem in discrete Optimal Transport (OT). One of them is extremely elementary, self-contained, and can be understood by beginners. I will then describe an application to Liquid Crystals, which provides an explicit formula for the least energy required to produce a configuration with assigned defects. Next I will present striking connections that we recently discovered with P. Mironescu between OT and least area formulas for the classical Plateau problem.
Biography:
Professor Haim Brezis is a Distinguished Visiting Professor of Mathematics at Rutgers University and a Pro-fessor at Technion, Israel. He is one of the leading experts on nonlinear functional analysis and partial dif-ferential equations. Professor Brezis is a member of the French Academy of Sciences, Academia Euro-paea, and foreign member of the US National Academy of Sciences and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Professor Brezis holds honorary doctorates from several universities including National Technical University of Athens and honorary professorships from Academia Sinica, Fudan University and Beijing Normal University. Brezis is listed as an ISI highly cited researcher.
Seminar by the NYU-ECNU Institute of Mathematical Sciences at NYU Shanghai