Nassif Ghoussoub | PIMS - Pacific Institute for the Mathematical Sciences

Professor of Mathematics, University of British Columbia

Nassif Ghoussoub is the founding director of the Pacific Institute for the Mathematical Sciences (PIMS). Under his leadership, PIMS was created in 1996, and the institute rapidly evolved into a unique bi-national scientific partnership involving all major universities of Alberta, BC and Washington State. During his directorship (1996-2003) PIMS became recognized world-wide as an effective new model for the mathematical sciences: one that addresses simultaneously the imperatives of research, education and technology transfer, and one that was able to unite a diverse community of many institutions over a geographically challenging area.

Dr. Ghoussoub's service to the world's mathematical community has been nothing short of extraordinary. In 1999, he founded --in collaboration with Don Dawson (Director of the Fields institute, Toronto), Luc Vinet (Director of the CRM, Montreal), and Steve Halperin (U. of Toronto)-- the MITACS Network of Centres of Excellence (Mathematics of Information Technology & Complex Systems). He is currently a member of the MITACS' Board of Directors. In 2001, he founded --in collaboration with David Eisenbud (UC Berkeley), and Robert V. Moody (U. Alberta)-- the Banff International Research Station (BIRS), and he has been the scientific director of the station since 2004.

Dr. Ghoussoub received an undergraduate degree from the Lebanese University of Beirut in 1973 and a doctorat d'état from Université Pierre et Marie Curie in Paris in 1979. His present research interests are in non-linear analysis and partial differential equations. He is currently a Professor of Mathematics and a Distinguished University Scholar of the University of British Columbia. In 2015, he was awarded an honorary degree (DSc) from the University of Victoria and was appointed an officer to the Order of Canada.

His academic distinctions include the Coxeter-James Prize (1990), a UBC Killam Senior Research Fellowship (1992), the Jeffrey-Williams Prize (2007), and the UBC Faculty of Science Achievement Award for outstanding service and leadership (2007). He was elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada in 1993, and was awarded in 2004 a Doctorat Honoris Causa from the Université Paris-Dauphine.

He was chair of NSERC's grant selection committee for mathematics in 1995-1996, and is currently serving on the Killam committee of the Canada Council for the Arts (2007-2010). He was vice-president of the Canadian Mathematical Society from 1994 to 1996, the editor-in-chief of the Canadian Journal of Mathematics from 1993 to 2002, the founding editor-in chief of the "Pi in the Sky" magazine, and is currently on the editorial board of various international journals.

Dr. Ghoussoub served as the PIMS Director from the creation of the organization in 1996 until 2003.

Thursday, March 12 9:30 am: Start 9:30 am - 10:30 am: Nassif Ghoussoub (University of British Columbia) Title: Skew-linear entropies, Kantorovich operators and their ergodic theory Abstract: Kantorovich operators are non-linear extensions of Markov...

Gangbo, Gui and Esedoglu will be around for a week or so in January as part of the CRG. There will be a dinner party hosted at Nassif's house in the evening of January 17th to which all attendees are invited. Location: MATX 1100 ( map) 9:30 - 10:00...

Optimal Transport theory emerged more than two centuries ago as an engineering problem posed by Gaspard Monge just before the French revolution. Its rich mathematical structure was first revealed by the Russian Nobel-prize winner Kantorovich during...

Given a probability measure $\mu$ on a domain $\Omega \subset \R^d$, we consider the symmetric version of the Monge-Kantorovich theorem on the product space $\Omega^N$, where the cost function $c$ is symmetric and all the prescribed marginals are...

The optimal transportation problem, which originated in the work of Gaspard Monge in 1781, provides a fundamental and quantitave way to measure the distance between probability distributions. It has led to many successful applications in PDEs...

This is part II of the February 28 talk. Original abstract: I will describe how deterministic and stochastic dynamic optimal mass transports are to Mean Field Games what the classical calculus of variations offers to classical mechanics.

I will describe how deterministic and stochastic dynamic optimal mass transports are to Mean Field Games what the classical calculus of variations offers to classical mechanics.

I consider two different approaches for breaking scale invariance and restoring compactness for borderline variational problems involving the Hardy-Schrodinger operator -\Delta -\frac{\gamma}{|x|^2} on a domain containing the singularity 0, either in...

For any given integer N larger than 2, we show that every bounded measurable vector field is N-cyclically monotone up to a measure preserving N-involution. The proof involves the solution of a multidimensional symmetric Monge-Kantorovich problem...