Vorträge in der Woche 27.02.2023 bis 05.03.2023

Donnerstag, 02.03.2023: A nonsmooth approach to Einstein’s theory of gravity

Robert J. McCann (University of Toronto)

While Einstein’s theory of gravity is formulated in a smooth setting, the celebrated singularity theorems of Hawking and Penrose describe many physical situations in which this smoothness must eventually breakdown. In positive-definite signature, there is a highly successful theory of metric and metric-measure geometry which includes Riemannian manifolds as a special case, but permits the extraction of nonsmooth limits under dimension and curvature bounds analogous to the energy conditions in relativity: here sectional curvature is reformulated through triangle comparison, while Ricci curvature is reformulated using entropic convexity along geodesics of probability measures. This lecture explores recent progress in the development of an analogous theory in Lorentzian signature, whose ultimate goal is to provide a nonsmooth theory of gravity.