SCIENCE AT THE SHINE DOME canberra 6 - 8 may 2009

New Fellows Seminar

Thursday, 7 May 2009

Professor Xu Jia Wang FAA
Centre for Mathematics and its Applications, Mathematical Sciences Institute, Australian National University, Canberra

Xu Jia Wang is currently a professor of mathematics at the Australian National University (ANU). He received his PhD in 1990 from Zhejiang University, China, and was a lecturer there until 1995 when he took a research fellow position at the ANU. He was then an ARC Research Fellow, senior fellow, and became a professor in 2005 at the Institute of Advanced Studies at the ANU. His main research interest is nonlinear partial differential equations and applications in geometry and physics. His main contributions include the resolution of the Chern conjecture in affine geometry, the solution to Monge’s optimal transportation problem, and the development of the variational and potential theory for the Hessian equations. He received the 2002 Medal of the Australian Mathematical Society, and the Morningside Gold medal from the third International Congress of Chinese Mathematicians.

Optimal transportation and light reflection

Xu Jia will discuss an application of his pure mathematics research. In optimal transportation we want to find the best scheme to transport one mass distribution, such as a pile of sand, to another one, such that the total cost is minimised. This problem was studied by mathematicians more than 200 years ago. A major breakthrough was made by Kantorovich, which won him the 1975 Nobel Prize in economics. He shall explain that light reflection is an optimal transportation, and so the linear programming developed by Kantorovich and colleagues can be used in the reflector antenna design.