Organized by:
Michael Kunzinger (U Vienna)
Andrea Mondino (Oxford)
Marcus Khuri (Stony Brook)
Raquel Perales (CIMAT)
Richard Schoen (UC Irvine)
Christina Sormani (CUNYGC and Lehman College)
Guoliang Yu (TAMU)
In the past decade, significant advances in the understanding of spaces arising in General Relativity have been achieved using techniques from Metric Geometry, Optimal Transport, and Geometric Measure Theory. Mathematicians have combined these geometric methods with great success in the past to develop low regularity notions of convergence and limits for Riemannian Manifolds with Ricci and Scalar curvature bounds, like Gromov-Hausdorff, metric measure, and Intrinsic flat convergence to metric spaces, RCD spaces, and integral current spaces respectively. These geometric techniques are now being applied to develop low regularity notions of convergence and limits for the space-times and initial data sets satisfying Einstein’s Equations or the Positive Energy Condition.
This program and its accompanying workshop, Geometric Measure Theory on Metric Spaces with Applications to Physics and Geometry, will bring together experts in Metric Geometry, Geometric Measure Theory, and Optimal Transport to communicate with leaders in Mathematical General Relativity to explore how the classical low regularity techniques from Partial Differential Equations and Functional Analysis can be combined with these new geometric methods to build a stronger understanding of the geometry and causal structures of sequences of space-times which do not converge smoothly. We will explore how these techniques can be applied together to understand the stability of various standard models from FLRW spacetimes to Minkowski and Kerr spacetimes even in settings where there are many gravity wells and black holes preventing one from constructing a diffeomorphism and using smoother notions of convergence.
The program will hold one mini course the first week on the following topics:
“Optimal Transport and Synthetic Ricci Curvature Bounds” by Robert McCann (U Toronto) https://www.math.toronto.edu/mccann/
The program will hold one mini course the second week on the following topics:
“General Relativity and Intrinsic Flat Convergence” by Christina Sormani (CUNYGC and Lehman) https://sites.google.com/site/professorsormani
The program will hold one mini course the third week on the following topics:
“Optimal Transport and the Positive Energy Condition in General Relativity” by Andrea Mondino
https://www.maths.ox.ac.uk/people/andrea.mondino
In addition there will be weekly seminars where participant will have the opportunity to speak.
This program will also host a workshop: Geometric Measure Theory on Metric Spaces with Applications to Physics and Geometry September 15-19, 2025.