Discontinuous vector fields arise naturally in some applications. In this presentation, a simple classical model of ocean circulation is introduced as an example of how discontinuities give rise to nonunique solutions. Standard bifurcation techniques often fail when the vector field is not smooth, and certainly fail when the vector field is discontinuous. However, some topological techniques seem to carry over, and a crude birfurcation theory can be extended to a large class of discontinuous systems.

Certain diffusive PDEs can be viewed as infinite-dimensional gradient flows. This fact has led to the development of new tools in various areas of mathematics ranging from PDE theory to data science. In this talk, we focus on two different directions: model-driven approaches and data-driven approaches.
In the first part of the talk we use gradient flows for analyzing non-linear and non-local aggregation-diffusion equations when the corresponding energy functionals are not necessarily convex. Moreover, the gradient flow structure enables us to make connections to well-known functional inequalities, revealing possible links between the optimizers of these inequalities and the equilibria of certain aggregation-diffusion PDEs.
In the second part, we use and develop gradient flow theory to design novel tools for data analysis. We draw a connection between gradient flows and Ensemble Kalman methods for parameter estimation. We introduce the Ensemble Kalman Sampler - a derivative-free methodology for model calibration and uncertainty quantification in expensive black-box models. The interacting particle dynamics underlying our algorithm can be approximated by a novel gradient flow structure in a modified Wasserstein metric which reflects particle correlations. The geometry of this modified Wasserstein metric is of independent theoretical interest.

The problem of optimal transportation, which involves finding the most
cost-efficient mapping between two measures, arises in many different applications. However, the numerical solution of this problem remains extremely challenging and standard techniques can fail to compute the correct solution. Recently, several methods have been proposed that obtain the solution by solving the Monge-Ampere equation, a fully nonlinear elliptic partial differential equation (PDE), coupled to a non-standard implicit boundary condition. Unfortunately, standard techniques for analyzing numerical methods for fully nonlinear elliptic equations fail in this setting. We introduce a modified PDE that couples
the usual Monge-Ampere equation to a Hamilton-Jacobi equation that restricts the transportation of mass. This leads to a simple framework for guaranteeing that a numerical method will converge to the true solution, which applies to a large class of approximation schemes. We describe some simple examples. A range of challenging computational examples demonstrate the effectiveness of this method, including the recent application of these methods to problems in beam shaping and seismic inversion.