Optimal transport theory meets the steel industry, a talk by Dr David Bourne (Heriot-Watt University)
Abstract
Optimal transport theory goes back to 1781 and the French engineer Gaspard Monge, who wanted to find the optimal way of transporting soil for building earthworks for Napoleon’s troops. While Leonid Kantorovich made some progress on the problem in the 1940s with the invention of linear programming, the problem remained unsolved for over 200 years. In fact it was not even known whether there existed a solution until some big mathematical breakthroughs in the 1980s and 1990s. These theoretical advances opened the floodgates to applications. Optimal transport theory is now applied to PDEs, geometry, economics, image processing, crowd dynamics, statistics, machine learning, and the list goes on. In July 2018 the Italian mathematician Alessio Figalli won a Fields Medal for his work in optimal transport and PDEs. In this talk I will describe a surprising new application of optimal transport in the steel industry.
No charge is made to attend meetings; non-IMA members are welcome.
