Welcome!
Important Dates
financial support:
April 30, 2024
the reduced fee:
May 20, 2024
June 7, 2024
June 17 – June 21, 2024
The Institute of Mathematics at Eötvös Loránd University is pleased to announce its regular one week long summer school in mathematics titled
The origins of the mathematical formulation of optimal transport problem can be traced back to a paper by Gaspard Monge, published in 1781. The problem itself is very simple: given a certain mass, say, a pile of sand, located somewhere in the space, move it to another prescribed location at the lowest cost. The discrete version of the problem can be thought of as finding a minimal weight matching in a valued bipartite graph. Major advances in the field were made around 1940 with the work of Leonid Kantorovich, a mathematician and economist (one of the early winners of Nobel Memorial Prize for Economy) – hence the name Monge–Kantorovich transportation problem is also used. In a parallel development, results of Hungarian mathematicians Dénes Kőnig and Jenő Egerváry laid the foundation for Harold W. Kuhn's celebrated "Hungarian method", an efficient algorithm for the minimum weight perfect matching problem in bipartite graphs. A renewed interest in the subject came when it became apparent that the topic is linked to many distant fields like partial differential equations, fluid mechanics, Riemannian geometry, measure theory, probability theory and functional equations, to name a few. This latest revival can be perhaps tied to a paper by Yann Brenier from 1987. Nowadays applications in image retrieval, cancer detection, machine learning and chemical physics make it one of the most popular topics in pure and applied mathematics.
The summer school will offer a first hand introduction into this exciting field. Lecture series will be supplemented by problems offered to students interested in the subject.
The minicourses will be aimed at advanced undergraduate / starting graduate students but interested PhD students are also welcome. We expect that participants would have a solid background in basic undergraduate mathematics but we do not assume preliminary acquaintance with the special topics of the school.
The lecturers are professors at Eötvös Loránd University (ELTE) in Budapest, of Alfréd Rényi Institute of Mathematics in Budapest, of Corvinus University in Budapest and of Hausdorff Center in Bonn (Germany). The lectures will take place at the Lágymányos Campus of Eötvös Loránd University (1117 Budapest, Pázmány Péter sétány 1/c, Hungary).
The lecturers are:
- Kristóf Bérczi (ELTE, Budapest)
- Tamás Király (ELTE, Budapest)
- Lorenzo Portinale (Hausdorff Center, Bonn)
- Tamás Titkos (Corvinus University and Rényi Institute, Budapest)
- Dániel Virosztek (Rényi Institute, Budapest)
City
Budapest, capital of Hungary is also known as The Pearl of the Danube. Regardless of the length of your stay, whether you come for one day or a week, you will always find enough things to do or places to visit: you can climb the Castle Hill and enjoy the view of the Danube and the Pest side of the city; you can have a walk through the City Park and visit one of the numerous museums (e.g. Museum of Fine Arts or the newly built House of Music) or the Millenium Monument; or in the evening you may want to attend an opera performance in the recently renovated Opera House. Thus, if you are interested in a true European metropolitan city with a vivid cultural life, then Budapest is an obvious choice.
Cost and Deadlines
The fee for participation in the Summer School is 120 euros (135 USD) if paid by May 20, and 170 euros (190 USD) afterwards. The fee covers printed course material and refreshments.
Please note that the university is not able to refund the registration fee in case of cancellation.
Deadline of application for financial support: April 30, 2024
Registration (and payment of the fee) begins on February 1, 2024 and will be closed on June 7, 2024 (with the possibility of paying the higher fee during the event). See the payment information.
First day of classes: June 17, 2024 (9 AM)
Last day of classes: June 21, 2024 (early afternoon)
Cancellation policy
- Please, note that due to university restrictions we are unable to send back the transferred registration fee even if you have to cancel your participation for medical reasons or for travel restrictions affecting your entrance to Hungary. However in this case you may use your fee to cover the registration cost of another (registered or unregistered) participant. Please, let us know if you would like to ask for such an arrangement.
- The organizers would like to reserve the right to cancel the event if the external circumstances would warrant such measures. In this exceptional case we will try to refund the participants by sending back the registration fee (within a month). However we will ask each participant to apply for such remibursement individually and let us know the account number to which the money should be sent back. — If cancellation seems to be unavoidable, we would inform participants about this by May 15, 2024.
Financial support
Financial support in the form of
- scholarship (contributing towards local costs), or
- waiver of the registration fee (complete or partial)
will be available in limited numbers for the participants. (The support was made possible by the donation of the organizing institutions, i.e. Eötvös Loránd University and Alfréd Rényi Institute of Mathematics.) If you would like to apply for support, please, send a letter before April 30, 2024 to the organizers. The letter should also contain:
- a short CV, containing among others your study data and motivation
- a recommendation letter
A decision based on academic excellence and financial circumstances will be made by the organizers before May 10, 2024. Due to the limited amount of available resources we encourage everyone to apply for external funding, too.
Schedule
Venue
Address of the university: 1117 Budapest, Pázmány Péter sétány 1/C
Lectures will be held in room 3-218, in the Southern Building of ELTE.