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Supported by The Lewiner Institute for Theoretical Physics and the French National Research Agency (ANR) through the OTARIE project March 22-26, 2009 Lewiner Institute Seminar Room Technion, Haifa, Israel Two apparently unrelated fields, both very fast moving, have recently started developing interactions. Cosmology has entered the age of high precision with large redshift surveys, cosmic microwave background measurements and cosmological 21 cm radio-astronomical surveys of neutral hydrogen at high redshifts. As a consequence our view of the evolving Universe has changed dramatically, regarding for example the role of dark matter and of dark energy. An important issue has become the dynamical and statistical reconstruction of the early (or high-redshift) Universe from present-epoch (zero-redshift) data. Optimal transport is nearly as old as Kant's first speculations on galaxies. In 1781 Gaspard Monge investigated how one should optimally move earth from one place to another, knowing only its initial and final spatial distributions, the cost being a prescribed function of the distance travelled by 'molecules' of earth. The present understanding of this optimal transportation problem is due to the founder of the modern optimization theory Leonid Kantorovich who showed in 1942 that it was an instance of the linear programming problem. Over the last decade optimal transport was evolving into an efficient numerical method applied to fields as diverse as meteorology, bioinformatics, and image retrieval and processing. One of the important inroads has been made into cosmological reconstruction of both low-redshift (peculiar velocities of galaxies) and high-redshift (initial conditions) features of the Universe from zero-redshift observational data. One of the goals of this multidisciplinary workshop is to bring together experts from the fields of cosmology, applied mathematics, and image processing and give them an opportunity to discuss optimization methods for analyzing very large data sets, such as those arising from cosmological observations. Among other focus topics are: * large-scale galaxy surveys, cosmic microwave background and implications for cosmological models; * high- and low-redshift applications of the least action and optimal transport methods to observational data; * optimal transport in mathematical physics: the Euler, Euler- Poisson, Vlasov, and Burgers equations; * image processing techniques based on optimal transport; * discrete and continuous strategies of numerical transport optimization; * fast and controlled approximation of optimal transport. The meeting will be divided roughly equally into more formal talks and less formal discussions/brainstorming sessions. In the talks part we plan to have 4-5 survey talks of 45' each, intended to give a state-of-the-art account of the main topics of the meeting to specialists in other fields, and about 20 regular talks of 30' presenting current research of participants. We are following here the layout of a successful series of workshops at the interface of applied mathematics, nonlinear dynamics and cosmology, with optimal transport as one prominent topic, held under the name of the Nonlinear Cosmology Program in Nice in 2003, 2004, 2006 and in Marseille in 2005 (see http://www.oca.eu/etc7/ncp06/ and links at that web site). We expect the meeting to be a point of fruitful encounter between these fields and also plan to attract specialists from related fields, such as nonlinear problems in astronomy, computational geometry, network optimization, and bioinformatics. We are currently investigating sources of financing that would allow to partially support participants coming from abroad. We hope very much that you will be able to participate in the workshop. Organizers: Adi Nusser (Technion, email: adi@physics.technion.ac.il Uriel Frisch (Observatoire de la Cote d'Azur, France) Andrei Sobolevskii (Moscow State University, Russia) Coordinator: Liz Yodim (e-mail: liz@physics.technion.ac.il) |
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