ICTP/SISSA Joint Colloquium 12 April

ICTP will hold a joint ICTP-SISSA Colloquium by Professor Luigi Ambrosio, Director of Scuola Normale Superiore, on "On some variational problems involving functions with bounded Hessian". The Colloquium will take place in ICTP's Budinich Lecture Hall on Wednesday 12 April at 16:00 CET and will also be livestreamed on ICTP's YouTube channel. 

Luigi Ambrosio has been a full professor of Mathematical Analysis at Scuola Normale Superiore of Pisa since 1997. In 2019, he was nominated as Director of Scuola Normale Superiore. Ambrosio is a long-term visiting scientist at the Max Planck Institute of Leipzig, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the ETH of Zurich, and the Institute Henri Poincaré of Paris. Prior to joining Scuola Normale Superiore, Ambrosio was full professor at the University of Pisa and at the University of Benevento, both in Italy. 

Ambrosio's scientific interests include the calculus of variations, the Geometric Measure Theory; the Transportation Theory and their application to partial differential equations. For his research he has been awarded numerous prizes, including the Riemann Prize of the Riemann International Mathematics School (2022); the Balzan Prize for achievements in the theory of partial differential equations (2019); the Blaise Pascal Medal of the European Academy of Sciences (2019); and the gold medal for achievements in Mathematics awarded by the XL National Academy of Sciences, Italy (2015). 

In his talk, Professor Ambrosio will illustrate new questions at the interface between Calculus of Variations and Geometric Measure Theory, motivated in a broad sense by the more applied machine learning community. More specifically, he will deal with second-order variational problems in the setting of functions with bounded variation and study the extremal properties of continuous and piecewise affine functions in the unit ball of a suitable energy, used as a regularization term in the applied community. In connection with this, a fine approximation result by piecewise affine function has been investigated.

The talk will be followed by a question-and-answer session and light refreshments will be served in the lobby shortly after. For more information, please see https://indico.ictp.it/event/10298