Tensor decomposition express a tensor as a linear combination of elementary tensors. They have applications in chemometrics, computer science, machine learning, psychometrics, and signal processing. Their uniqueness properties render them suitable for data analysis tasks in which the elementary tensors are the quantities of interest. However, in applications, the idealized mathematical model is corrupted by measurement errors. For a robust interpretation of the data, it is therefore imperative to quantify how sensitive these elementary tensors are to perturbations of the whole tensor. I will give an overview of recent results on the condition number of tensor decompositions, established with my collaborators C. Beltran, P. Breiding, and N. Dewaele.

Accurately predicting turbulent fluid mechanics remains a significant challenge in engineering and applied science. Reynolds-Averaged Navier–Stokes (RANS) simulations and Large-Eddy Simulation (LES) are generally accurate, though non-Boussinesq turbulence and/or unresolved multiphysical phenomena can preclude predictive accuracy in certain regimes. In turbulent combustion, flame–turbulence interactions lead to inverse-cascade energy transfer, which violates the assumptions of many RANS and LES closures. We survey the regime dependence of these effects using a series of high-resolution Direct Numerical Simulations (DNS) of turbulent jet flames, from which an intermediate regime of heat-release effects, associated with the hypothesis of an “active cascade,” is apparent, with severe implications for physics- and data-driven closure models. We apply adjoint-based data assimilation method to augment the RANS and LES equations using trusted (though not necessarily high-fidelity) data. This uses a Python-native flow solver that leverages differentiable-programming techniques, automatic construction of adjoint equations, and solver-in-the-loop optimization. Applications to canonical turbulence, shock-dominated flows, aerodynamics, and flow control are presented, and opportunities for reacting flow modeling are discussed.

Recently Linares-Otto-Tempelmayr have unveiled a very interesting algebraic structure which allows to define a new class of rough paths/regularity structures, with associated applications to stochastic PDEs or ODEs. This approach does not consider trees as combinatorial tools but their fertility, namely the function which associates to each integer k the number of vertices in the tree with exactly k children. In a joint work with J-D Jacques we have studied this algebraic structure and shown that it is related with a general and simple class of so-called post-Lie algebras. The construction has remarkable properties and I will try to present them in the simplest possible way.

Placeholder entry; date+time TBC. 

Abstract for talk: In this talk, we present a systematic discretization of the Bernstein-Gelfand-Gelfand (BGG) diagrams and complexes over cubical meshes of arbitrary dimension via the use of tensor-product structures of one-dimensional piecewise-polynomial spaces, such as spline and finite element spaces. We demonstrate the construction of the Hessian, the elasticity, and div-div complexes as examples for our construction.