SAIP WEBINARS
Title: How blue skies research created billions of Rands worth of impact in South Africa.
Speaker: Prof. Hugo Touchette – Department of Mathematical Sciences
Stellenbosch University, South Africa
Date: 26 February 2021
Link: https://zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_2Pk20C9lTqOTyLOiCqiecQ
Abstract:
I will give a basic overview of the theory of large deviations, developed by Varadhan (Abel Prize 2007) in the 1970s, and of its applications in statistical physics. In the first part of the talk, I will discuss the basics of this theory and its historical sources, which can be traced back in mathematics to Cramer (1938) and Sanov (1960) and, on the physics side, to Einstein (1910) and Boltzmann (1877). In the second part, I will show how the theory can be applied to study equilibrium and nonequilibrium systems and to express many key concepts of statistical physics in a clear mathematical way.
Brief CV:
Prof. Hugo Touchette obtained his PhD from McGill University in Montreal, Canada, where is from. He moved to the Applied Mathematics Division of Stellenbosch University in 2019 after spending 7 years as Researcher at the National Institute for Theoretical Physics in Stellenbosch and, prior to moving to South Africa, 9 years at Queen Mary University of London, UK. His research is in the areas of statistical physics, stochastic processes, simulations, and machine learning.