Event
Control and Dynamical Lecture Series: Pierre-Antoine Absil, "Gotchas in nonlinear systems analysis"
Thursday, March 25, 2010
2:00 p.m.
2168 A.V. Williams Building
Pamela White
301 405 6576
pwhite@umd.edu
Control and Dynamical Lecture Series
Gotchas in nonlinear systems analysis
Pierre-Antoine Absil
Department of Mathematical Engineering
Catholic University of Louvain
Abstract
We will list and comment on a few results in nonlinear dynamical systems theory that, arguably, can be easily misread. What does the Hartman-Grobman theorem really say? What are the hypotheses in the Hopf bifurcation theorem? What do we really know about the convergence of gradient flows? And about the stability of their equilibria?
Biography
Pierre-Antoine Absil's major research area is numerical optimization, with particular interests in numerics on manifolds, linear and nonlinear programming algorithms, and biomedical applications. He was awarded the 2000 IBRA-BIRA prize for his Graduate Thesis (analysis of cardiological signals) and the 2002 SIAM Student Paper Prize for the paper "A Grassmann-Rayleigh Quotient Iteration for Computing Invariant Subspaces."
Dr. Absil received a Bachelor's Degree in Physics Engineering in 1998 and a Doctorate in 2003, both from the University of Liège, Belgium. He was supported by a Pisart research fellowship from the University of Liège. From 1999 to 2003, he was a Research Fellow with the Belgian National Fund for Scientific Research. In 2003-2005, he was a Postdoctoral Associate with the School of Computational Science at Florida State University. He was the Microsoft Research Fellow with Peterhouse, University of Cambridge (UK) in 2005-2006. Since September 2005, he has been an associate professor in the Department of Mathematical Engineering of the Catholic University of Louvain. He has also been a visitor with Monash University, Australia (2001), the University of Würzburg, Germany (2002), and Sandia National Laboratories, USA (2005).
