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We are pleased to welcome Felix Otto (MPI Leipzig) for the next Mathematical Colloquium on Thursday, 23 April 2026, at 16:15 in the Mathematikon lecture hall. Felix Otto, Director of the MPI in Leipzig and a leading expert in analysis and partial differential equations, will give a talk entitled “Convection-enhanced diffusion, and Brownian motion on the Lie group SLn”.
Abstract:
This talk draws a connection between a well-known phenomenon in fluid dynamics and an object from differential geometry. On the one hand, the ubiquitous phenomenon is that advection by a turbulent divergence-free drift effectively (and dramatically) enhances the diffusion of particles in n-dimensional Euclidean space. On the other hand, the object from differential geometry is a natural notion of Brownian motion on SLₙ, the Lie group and Riemannian manifold of matrices of unit determinant; it is a tensorial version of geometric Brownian motion.The connection is established by tracking the relative position of a pair of particles as a function of their initial configuration and involves a change of time variables: the “time” parameter for the Brownian motion on SLₙ is given by the logarithm of the effective diffusivity of the particles, which increases with physical time.
This is joint work with Peter Morfe and Christian Wagner.
All interested colleagues and students are warmly invited to attend.
Further information: