Robert McCann | PIMS - Pacific Institute for the Mathematical Sciences

Professor of Mathematics, University of Toronto

Robert McCann is a Professor of Mathematics and holds a Canada Research Chair in Mathematics, Economics, and Physics at the University of Toronto. He is a world leader in the field of optimal transportation, and has played a pioneering role in its rapid development since the mid 90’s. In particular, the notion of displacement convexity, introduced in his PhD thesis, lies behind many of the area’s myriad applications. His distinguished research record has been recognized with many prestigious awards, including an invited lecture at the 2014 International Congress of Mathematicians, election to the Royal Society of Canada in 2014, the 2017 Jeffery-Williams prize of the Canadian Mathematical Society, and the 2023 W.T. and Idalia Reid Prize of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics. Dr. McCann has been a member of the PIMS SRP since 2023.

Robert McCann of the University of Toronto has been awarded the 2026 CRM-Fields-PIMS Prize and will deliver the prize lecture on March 20 at 12:30 PM PT / 3:30 PM ET. In the words of the selection committee, Professor McCann “was awarded the CRM...

The first regularity results for maps optimizing an open class of cost were proved by Ma-Trudinger-Wang (2005) using a key inequality which they introduced (based on a classical strategy of Pogorelov). Away from the boundary, this inequality controls...

The principal-agent problem is an important paradigm in economic theory for studying the value of private information; the nonlinear pricing problem faced by a monopolist is one example; others include optimal taxation and auction design. For...

While Einstein's theory of gravity is formulated in a smooth setting, the celebrated singularity theorems of Hawking and Penrose describe many physical situations in which this smoothness must eventually breakdown. In positive-definite signature...

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...

Designed for graduate students and postdoctoral fellows, the programme will focus on recent progress in non-linear partial differential equations and their applications. In particular, the programme will emphasise three interlocking themes: Nonlinear...

The Monge-Kantorovich optimal transportation problem is to pair producers with consumers so as to minimize a given transportation cost. When the producers and consumers are modeled by probability densities on two given manifolds or subdomains, it is...

The classical problem of optimal transportation can be formulated as a linear optimization problem on a convex domain: among all joint measures with fixed marginals find the optimal one, where optimality is measured against a given cost function...

Economists are interested in studying who matches with whom (and why) in the educational, labour, and marriage sectors. With Aloysius Siow, Xianwen Shi, and Ronald Wolthoff, we propose a toy model for this process, which is based on the assumption...

In the last few decades, the theory of optimal transportation has blossomed into a powerful tool for exploring applications both within and outside mathematics. Its impact is felt in such far ?ung areas as geometry, analysis, dynamics, partial...