Mathematics Colloquium

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Propagation of chaos and irreversibility in gas dynamics

Speaker: Laure Saint-Raymond, ENS Lyon

Location: Warren Weaver Hall 1302

Date: Monday, October 23, 2017, 3:45 p.m.

Synopsis:

I will review various contributions on the fundamental work of Lanford deriving the Boltzmann equation from hard-sphere dynamics in the low density limit. I will focus especially on the assumptions made on the initial data and on how they encode irreversibility. We will see that the impossibility to reverse time in the Boltzmann equation (expressed for instance by Boltzmann's H-theorem) is related to the lack of convergence of higher order correlations on some singular sets.