This paper is devoted to the theoretical and numerical investigation of the local minimum problem in an inverse boundary value problem. We provide a mathematical analysis for the objective function of the optimal transportation type in the context of seismic full waveform inversion. In particular, we prove that the gradient obtained using the adjoint-state method does not depend on the specific choice of the Kantorovich potentials. Moreover, our frequency analysis results show a decreasing sensitivity of the reconstruction as the data misfit is concentrated in the high-frequency part. This confirms previous observations in many numerical experiments. We also propose a new method using the softplus encoding, which maps the seismic data into probability measures and, therefore, the Wasserstein metric can be applied. The softplus encoding retains the convexity of the data misfit with respect to translations and provides a parameter to tune the landscape of the objective function. The effectiveness of the proposed method is demonstrated numerically on an inversion task with the benchmark Marmousi model.

We show that the Masur–Veech volumes and area Siegel–Veech constants can be obtained using intersection theory on strata of Abelian differ- entials with prescribed orders of zeros. As applications, we evaluate their large genus limits and compute the saddle connection Siegel–Veech constants for all strata. We also show that the same results hold for the spin and hyperelliptic components of the strata.

We prove the following conjecture of Furstenberg (1969): if 𝐴,𝐵⊂[0,1] are closed and invariant under ×𝑝 mod1 and ×𝑞 mod1, respectively, and if log𝑝/log𝑞∉ℚ, then for all real numbers 𝑢 and 𝑣, dim_H (𝑢𝐴 + 𝑣) ∩ 𝐵 ≤ max {0, dim_H 𝐴 + dim_H 𝐵 − 1}. We obtain this result as a consequence of our study on the intersections of incommensurable self-similar sets on ℝ. Our methods also allow us to give upper bounds for dimensions of arbitrary slices of planar self-similar sets satisfying SSC and certain natural irreducible conditions.

Quantum Fourier analysis is a subject that combines an algebraic Fourier transform (pictorial in the case of subfactor theory) with analytic estimates. This provides interesting tools to investigate phenomena such as quantum symmetry. We establish bounds on the quantum Fourier transform F, as a map between suitably defined L^p spaces, leading to an uncertainty principle for relative entropy. We cite several applications of quantum Fourier analysis in subfactor theory, in category theory, and in quantum information. We suggest a topological inequality, and we outline several open problems.

We study a family of maximal operators that provides a continuous link connecting the Hardy–Littlewood maximal function to the spherical maximal function. Our theorems are proved in the multilinear setting but may contain new results even in the linear case. For this family of operators we obtain bounds between Lebesgue spaces in the optimal range of exponents.