Promotion Talk for Dr. Florent Baudier

Date: September 25, 2018

Time: 4:00PM - 5:00PM

Location: BLOC 220

Speaker: Florent Baudier, Texas A&M University

Description:

Title: Banach spaces and graphs: geometric interactions and applications.

Abstract:

After briefly discussing some impactful educational activities I have been running in the past few years I will describe my research agenda. Faithful embeddability of metric spaces into Banach spaces is pivotal to research areas as diverse as:
-the design of approximation algorithms in theoretical computer science (sparsest cut problem, multi-commodity flows, nearest neighbor search, sketching...),
-topology (Novikov conjecture), -noncommutative geometry (coarse Baum-Connes conjecture),
-geometric group theory (amenability).
This list, which is obviously non-exhaustive, can be stretched at will since metric spaces, with a wide variety of features, arise in nearly all areas of mathematics. In this talk, I will focus on bi-Lipschitz and coarse embeddings of graphs (finite and infinite) into Banach spaces whose unit ball possesses some desirable convexity or smoothness property. The discussion will be carried at an elementary level, and I will present some fundamental ideas and applications rather than the latest technical achievements.