Department of Mathematics

Speaker: Martins Bruveris
Title: Riemannian Metrics on Shape Spaces: Theory and Applications
Affiliation: Brunel University London
Date: Friday, April 14, 2017
Place and Time: Room 101, Love Building, 3:35-4:30 pm
Refreshments: Room 204, Love Building, 3:00 pm

Abstract. The word `shape' denotes the external form, contour or outline of something. Shape is a basic physical property of objects and plays an important role in applications such as evolutionary biology or automated image understanding. Mathematically one can define a shape to be an embedded submanifold in ambient space. The shape space is the collection of all shapes. To perform statistical inferences it is necessary to equip the shape space with additional structure, for example a distance function or a Riemannian metric. In this talk I will describe a class of Riemannian metrics that are used in shape analysis. By doing so we will see how functional analysis and differential geometry interact in infinite dimensions and that the infinite-dimensional landscape can be full of traps for the careless traveller.