Marsden Memorial Lecture | PIMS - Pacific Institute for the Mathematical Sciences

The Marsden Memorial Lecture Series is dedicated to the memory of Jerrold E Marsden (1942-2010), a world-renowned Canadian applied mathematician. Marsden was the Carl F Braun Professor of Control and Dynamical Systems at Caltech, and prior to that he was at the University of California (Berkeley) for many years. He did extensive research in the areas of geometric mechanics, dynamical systems and control theory. He was one of the original founders in the early 1970s of reduction theory for mechanical systems with symmetry, which remains an active and much studied area of research today.

Marsden lectures are high-profile lectures in applied mathematics (broadly construed), and can take place around the PIMS Network. Suggestions for speakers in the Marsden Memorial Lecture Series can be made at any time to the Deputy Director of PIMS, and there will be an annual call for nominations in March of each year. Nominations of speakers enhancing PIMS's mission to reach out to diverse audiences are especially encouraged. Suggested speakers will be evaluated based on their academic distinction in mathematics and its applications, the ability to deliver an engaging talk to a broad mathematical audience and diversity considerations.

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Previous Marsden Memorial Lectures

I will begin with some memories of how Jerry Marsden was as an advisor. In addition to the clarity and creativity of his mathematical thought, what has remained in my memory are his generosity with ideas, kindness as a human being, and his hands-on...

Geometric mechanics describes Lagrangian and Hamiltonian mechanics geometrically, and information geometry formulates statistical estimation, inference, and machine learning in terms of geometry. A divergence function is an asymmetric distance...

I will present nonlinear dynamics for distributed decision-making that derive from principles of symmetry and bifurcation. Inspired by studies of animal groups, including house-hunting honeybees and schooling fish, the nonlinear dynamics describe a...

The global study of the space of solutions of the Einstein constraint equations goes back to work of Jerry Marsden and co-workers in the early 1970s. Since that time the subject has evolved in interesting ways. First it has been possible to localize...

The slides for this event are available on mathtube.org. As the Euler theory of hydrodynamics (1757), the Born-Infeld theory of electromagnetism (1934) enjoys a simple and beautiful geometric structure. Quite surprisingly, the BI model which is of...

Geometry is at the foundation of many physical theories, even if it is often obfuscated by their formulations in vectorial or tensorial notations. When computational simulation is needed, leveraging geometric formulations of physical models can...

I will describe results concerning evolution equations involving nonlocal terms. Particular examples will include the Surface Quasi-Geostrophic equation (SQG) and its generalizations. I will discuss a nonlinear maximum principle for linear nonlocal...

Richard Montgomery received undergraduate degrees in both mathematics and physics from Sonoma State in Northern California. He completed his PhD under Jerry Marsden at Berkeley in 1986, after which he held a Moore Instructorship at MIT for two years...

Alan Weinstein is a Professor of the Graduate School in the Department of Mathematics at the University of California, Berkeley. He was a colleague of Jerry Marsden throughout Jerry’s career at Berkeley, and their joint papers on “Reduction of...