Speaker: Soumik Pal

Title: An overview of entropy-regularized optimal transport

Abstract: The theory of Monge-Kantorovich optimal transport has become widely popular in various areas of mathematics and its applications. Part of this popularity is due to a regularized version of the problem with the entropy serving as a penalty function. It turns out that the entropy-regularized version of optimal transport is itself mathematically rich and a confluence of ideas from physics, large deviations, stochastic processes, geometry, and PDEs. This talk will provide an overview and many aspects of rapidly evolving current research. If time permits we will talk about some recent results on approximations of Wasserstein gradient flows with iterated entropy regularized optimal transport.