Ravi Sheth, University of Pennsylvania
When
Refreshments served at 3:00 pm in the 3rd Floor Atrium
TAP Cosmology Initiative Lecture
Ravi Sheth, University of Pennsylvania
Visit Dates: May 10-23, 2026
Title: Back to the Future: Optimal Transport Untangling of the Cosmic Web
Abstract: Gravity distorts and displaces objects as it weaves the cosmic web. Disentangling these effects will be important in next generation datasets which will not just enable, they will require next-generation analyses. Optimal Transport methods have recently found use in a number of different fields. I'll discuss why they are naturally suited to the cosmological reconstruction problem, and highlight how they differ from the current state of the art, before showing results from an Optimal Transport-based method for reconstructing the full initial fluctuation field from observations of a biased subset of tracers of the cosmic web.
Bio: Ravi Sheth was a Marshall Scholar at Cambridge where he got his PhD in 1994. He then spent time at UCBerkeley (1994-1996), the Max-Planck Institut fuer Astrophysik in Garching (1996-1999), and Fermilab (1999-2001) before becoming an Assistant Professor at the University of Pittsburgh (2002-2004). He moved to Penn in 2005, where he became an Associate Professor in 2007 and a full Professor in 2009. He spends his summers at the International Centre for Theoretical Physics in Trieste, and serves as a member of the Science Advisory Board of the Kaufman Foundation and the Scientific Council of the East Africa Institute for Fundamental Research.
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