ACDC Seminar/Colloquium by Alejandro Fernández Jiménez on the 25th of February

On 25-02-2026 at 16:00, Alejandro Fernández Jiménez (VU Amsterdam) will give an Amsterdam Dynamics Seminar/Colloquium talk. Note that this is both a general colloquium as a dynamics seminar. We will go for drinks at Bar Boele after the talk.

The talk will take place in the Maryam seminar room (9A-46).

Title:  An overview on gradient flows

Abstract: We will first briefly recall the theory of gradient flows in the Euclidean setting. Afterwards, we will present its generalisation to metric spaces by Ambrosio, Gigli and Savaré and finally we will explain how a family of PDEs can be interpreted as gradient flows for the Wasserstein metric on the space of probability measures  (a distance induced by optimal transport). Then, it will come a short introduction to optimal transport in which, for instance, we will define the notion of geodesic convexity and its applications towards the analysis of PDEs. Finally, we will apply this theory to a particular case and we will explain how to use gradient flows in order to obtain existence and a deterministic particle approximation for a particular fourth-order PDE. 

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