Mathematics Colloquia and Seminars

Return to Colloquia & Seminar listing

Entropy production and convergence to equilibrium

Colloquium

Speaker: Cedric Villani, Ecole Normale Sup
Location: 693 Kerr
Start time: Mon, May 3 2004, 4:10PM

Boltzmann's H Theorem predicts that under adequate assumptions, a rarefied gas will tend to a state of maximal entropy in large time. There has been huge effort and progress in the quantitative study of this phenomenon during the last 10 years. I will present some of these advances in a non-technical way, insisting on the links between this field and other topics in mathematics, such as information theory, central limit theorem, logarithmic Sobolev inequalities, hypoellipticity... Lecture notes on the subject can be found at http://www.umpa.ens-lyon.fr/~cvillani/surveys.html#entropyprod