Ecuador

Over the past thirty years there has been a growing need and interest for nonsmooth optimization methods. Nonsmoothness of objective or constraint functions may arise, for example, from heterogeneous material properties, from process controls and safety mechanisms that dynamically switch on and off; from variational inequality representations of free boundaries, phase transitions, contacts with friction; and from numerical schemes such as upwind finite differences and flux limiters.

The school is intended for students in mathematics, physics and engineering, graduate or undergraduate in the late years of their bachelor. The participants will be offered geometric notions of some mathematical theories useful for understanding problems related to mechanics and control theory. The programme of the school consists in 7 courses of 6 hours each, lectured by experts on the subjects, and is divided in three parts. The first part of the school is devoted to introduce the students to the tools needed from the geometry of smooth manifolds and their relation to mechanics.