Heat flow as gradient flow

Series
PDE Seminar
Time
Tuesday, February 22, 2011 - 11:00am for 1 hour (actually 50 minutes)
Location
Skiles 005
Speaker
Prof. Nicola Gigli – University of Nice – nicolagigli@googlemail.com
Organizer
Ronghua Pan
Aim of the talk is to make a survey on some recent results concerning analysis over spaces with Ricci curvature bounded from below. I will show that the heat flow in such setting can be equivalently built either as gradient flow of the natural Dirichlet energy in L^2 or as gradient flow if the relative entropy in the Wasserstein space. I will also show how such identification can lead to interesting analytic and geometric insights on the structures of the spaces themselves. From a collaboration with L.Ambrosio and G.Savare