Oliver Johnson

A short walk through optimal transport

It's an old and famous problem to find the most cost-efficient way to move a pile of earth from one place to another (or to rearrange probability distributions, if you prefer!). I'll talk about the classical framework for this problem in the setting of continuous space, as well as some of my efforts to extend this theory to discrete settings. More importantly, I'll try to explain why members of each of the Pure, Applied, PAD, Statistical Science and Mathematical Physics Institutes should care about this problem.