With a completely new way of approaching the subject, the mathematician Yunan Yang has managed to put the detection of earthquakes on a new footing. (Photograph: ETH Zurich / Alessandro Della Bella)
With a completely new way of approaching the subject, the mathematician Yunan Yang has managed to put the detection of earthquakes on a new footing. (Photograph: ETH Zurich / Alessandro Della Bella) Using applied mathematics, Yunan Yang finds solutions to the inverse problems that arise in seismology, weather forecasts, and machine learning. The key to her success is something called optimal transport. Inverse problems are Yunan Yang's specialty. "Our everyday life is full of them," she explains. "Ultrasound, for example, is an inverse problem." Medical ultrasound devices emit sound waves outside our range of hearing that travel through the body and then record the reflected waves. A software program processes the wave signals and shows what's going on in the body.
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