Optimal Transportation and Differential Geometry (12w5118)

The Banff International Research Station will host the "Optimal Transportation and Differential Geometry" workshop from May 20th to May 25th, 2012.

The optimal transportation problem consists in finding the most effective way of moving mass distributions from one place to another, minimizing the transportation cost. Such a concept has been found very useful in understanding various mathematical, physical, and social/economics phenomena, such as geophysical dynamics of the atmosphere and oceans, pattern formation of physical and biological objects, the principal-agent problem in microeconomic theory, to name a few. It has also applications in engineering design problems, image processing and also in computer science. For further development of optimal transportation theory and its applications, it looks more and more important to understand its relation with the geometry of the underlying space where the mass distribution and the target place live. In this workshop, fundamental aspects of optimal transportation in relation to geometry will be discussed and explored by leading experts as well as junior researchers, exchanging ideas and knowledge, finding new collaborations and identifying important open problems and new directions of research. A central focus will be on the relation between optimal transportation and various curvature notions of geometric spaces.

The Banff International Research Station for Mathematical Innovation and Discovery (BIRS) is a collaborative Canada-US-Mexico venture that provides an environment for creative interaction as well as the exchange of ideas, knowledge, and methods within the Mathematical Sciences, with related disciplines and with industry. The research station is located at The Banff Centre in Alberta and is supported by Canada's Natural Science and Engineering Research Council (NSERC), the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF), Alberta's Advanced Education and Technology, and Mexico's Consejo Nacional de Ciencia y Tecnología (CONACYT).