Georgia Institute of Technology College of Sciences

In nonlinear inverse problems, we often optimize an objective function involving many sources, where each source requires the solution of a PDE. This leads to the solution of a very large number of large linear systems for each nonlinear function evaluation, and potentially additional systems (for detectors) to evaluate or approximate a Jacobian. We propose a combination of simultaneous random sources and detectors and optimized (for the problem) sources and detectors to drastically reduce the number of systems to be solved. We apply our approach to problems in diffuse optical tomography.This is joint work with Misha Kilmer and Selin Sariaydin.

How well can a convex body be approximated by a polytope? This is a fundamental question in convex geometry, also in view of applications in many other areas of mathematics and related fields. It often involves side conditions like a prescribed number of vertices, or, more generally, k-dimensional faces and a requirement that the body contains the polytope or vice versa. Accuracy of approximation is often measured in the symmetric difference metric, but other metrics can and have been considered. We will present several results about these issues, mostly related to approximation by “random polytopes”.

A wide variety of questions which range from social and economic sciences to physical and biological sciences lead to functions with values that are sets in finite or infinite dimensional spaces, or that are fuzzy sets. Set-valued and fuzzy-valued functions attract attention of a lot of researchers and allow them to look at numerous problems from a new point of view and provide them with new tools, ideas and results. In this talk we consider a generalized concept of such functions, that of functions with values in so-called L-space, that encompasses set-valued and fuzzy functions as special cases and allow to investigate them from the common point of view. We will discus several problems of Approximation Theory and Numerical Analysis for functions with values in L-spaces. In particular numerical methods of solution of Fredholm and Volterra integral equations for such functions will be presented.