- Series
- Geometry Topology Student Seminar
- Time
- Wednesday, September 24, 2025 - 2:00pm for 1 hour (actually 50 minutes)
- Location
- Skiles 006
- Speaker
- Jaden Wang – Georgia Tech
- Organizer
- Alex Joshua Eldridge
Please Note: Pontryagin’s Maximum Principle (PMP) is a landmark result in optimal control theory that continues to enjoy abundant applications in engineering and sciences. It was originally proven for the Euclidean case to find optimal terminal speed of a rocket during the Cold War. Due to its Hamiltonian nature, it is not much harder to generalize to the smooth manifold case. In this introductory talk, I will first introduce the necessary symplectic/Hamiltonian formalism and then give a sketch of the proof. The goal is to highlight the elegant topological insights that reduce an infinite-dimensional optimization problem to a pointwise optimization of the Hamiltonian.
Abstract TBA