SISSA COLLOQUIUM

[Alex Meehan]

SISSA COLLOQUIUM

Thursday, 25 February, 16.30 - Lecture Room D, SISSA Main Building

The seminar will be preceded by a get-together at 4.10pm in front of 
room D for tea and coffee.

Speaker: Ugo Boscain (Functional Analysis Sector, SISSA)

Title:    Nonholonomic variational problems: applications to NMR and to 
image reconstruction.

Abstract

Nonholonomic variational problems are problems of optimization under
velocity constraints. The simplest example is the problem of parking a
car in minimum time: not all velocities are allowed. For instance, the
car cannot move transversally. However, these constraints do not imply
any constraint on the position and, therefore, they are called 
nonholonomic.

Nonholonomic variational problems are extremely interesting from a
mathematical viewpoint and include some generalizations of Riemannian
geometry. Nowadays they appear in many fields of research from
robotics, to aerospace engineering, to medicine, to quantum physics.
In this talk, I will illustrate an application to NMR and an
application to a problem of image reconstruction based on the
mathematical model of the visual cortex V1 according to Petitot, Citti
and Sarti.