MIT Topology Seminar
Monday, April 11, 2005
Room 2-131, 4:30pm
Gunnar Carlsson will speak on:
Topology of point cloud data with examples
Abstract: Algebraic topology has for the most part been used in situations
where by-hand computation of topological invariants is feasible, and
where one has complete information about the space in question. The
goal of this talk is to discuss the ideas behind current efforts to
compute homological invariants of spaces automatically, when one is
only given a large but finite set of points sampled from the space,
perhaps with noise. I will discuss the theory and techniques which
are used, and also describe some situations where such computations
are important for some "real world" problems.