Inverse problems for differential equations: how to ‘see’ an underground tectonic fault – a public lecture by Anna Mazzucato
Anna will give a brief introduction to inverse problems for differential equations—specifically, how solutions to differential equations can be used to remotely probe an object. Such problems arise in areas like medical imaging, non-destructive testing, and mineral exploration.
In seismology, the Earth’s interior can be investigated in various ways, such as by generating small earthquakes and analyzing the resulting seismic waves. Anna will present an alternative approach that uses GPS data from satellites to locate and monitor tectonic faults buried deep underground, even in the absence of earthquakes.
Anna Mazzucato is Professor of Mathematics and Distinguished Senior Scholar in the Eberly College of Science at Penn State University, University Park, USA. She works on problems in fluid mechanics and elasticity. Prior to joining Penn State in 2003, She was a Gibbs Instructor at Yale University and a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Institute for Mathematics and Its Applications in Minneapolis, Minnesota and the Simons Laufer Mathematical Sciences Institute (formerly MSRI) in Berkeley, California.
She obtained her PhD from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2000 under the direction of Michael Taylor. In 2011 Mazzucato received the Ruth I. Michel Memorial Prize from the Association for Women in Mathematics and Cornell University, and was elected a Fellow of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics in 2021 “for discerning analysis of fundamental problems in partial differential equations and mathematical fluid mechanics including boundary layers, transport, and mixing”. In 2023, she was awarded a Fellowship in Mathematics from the Simons Foundation. Mazzucato has written over 55 peer-reviewed scientific articles. She serves on the editorial boards of several journals, including Analysis and PDE, Nonlinearity, Physica D, and the SIAM Journal on Mathematical Analysis.
