Date: Wednesday October 8, 2014, at 3PM

Location: Cheek Hall 204

Dr. Xingping Sun, professor at the Department of Mathematics, MSU will be presenting a talk on “Positive Definite Functions on Spheres and Their Applications“. This presentation is part of the MSU Mathematics Lecture Series. Everyone is invited to attend.

Abstract:

Basking in historical grandeur and rich modern day applications, the theory of positive definite functions has its deep root in Fourier analysis. Although the center pieces of the theory were put in place by S. Bochner and I.J. Schoenberg around circa 1920s ~ 1940s, applications did not fully catch up until more than a half century later. With the help of modern computing technologies, mathematicians and scientists are frequently employing them as basis functions to model a variety of real world problems associated with large amounts of data. In this talk, we will discuss the classical representation theory of positive definite functions as well as their in the realms of interpolation and numerical solutions of partial differential equations.