Steve Melczer USRA project page - Adam Oberman Math

Steve Melczer USRA project page

Contents

Introduction

The goal of the summer USRA is to keep the student motivated and engaged in learning new mathematics, as well as productive in an accessible research project. This can involve, learning theory not normally covered in the undergraduate curriculum, seeing how the theory applies in current applications, writing up a research notes or a report, and possibly even engaging in original research.

From the theory point of view, one option is to learn Convex Analysis, aiming towards Ekeland's Variational Principle which explains how minima of variational problems behave as the problem is perturbed. (See the Dover reprint of Ekeland and Teman) These perturbed minima are important in current variational problems, such as Compressive Sensing, and Image Processing. From the research point of view, solving Hamilton-Jacobi equations using Linear Programming, in different polyhedral norms will tie together the optimization theory, some coding in MATLAB, and form an introductions to topics mentioned above. It also relates to Homogenization of metric Hamilton-Jacobi Equations, which is a current hot topic with an Application to Cloaking.

Project Schedule and Options

  • Learn enough convex analysis to understand necessary and sufficient conditions for a minimum of a non-smooth convex function.
  • Learn subdifferential calculus, and apply it to the shrinkage problem in general norms

Mid-June

  • Learn basic algorithms for Linear Programming.
  • Install and use some packages packages (Matlab, cvx, etc)
  • write a crude interior point solver, using linear algebra in Matlab
  • apply it to the structure systems coming from Finite Differences.

July 11th

Work Progress

See here