LFCS Seminar: 3 November 2020 - Primoz Skraba

Title: Optimisation, Topology, and Shapes

Abstract:

Topology provides, in a sense, a very rough description of a space –for example, a mesh, a scan, or some more abstract dataset.  One of the original motivations in applied topology was to capture the global structure of data.  This can problem can be turned around: suppose we know something about the global shape of data, how can we use this information?

In this talk, I will describe how topological information can be used for optimisation problems.  This is an idea which has seen many different applications in the last few years and I will provide a vignette of some of the applications, old and new.

Affiliate: School of Mathematical Sciences, Queen Mary University of London