Alexey Savvateev Visits HSE - NN

On May 24, Alexey Savvateev, the popular Russian mathematician, economist, and public figure visited the Higher School of Economics in Nizhny Novgorod.

At the invitation of A.M. Silaev, Alexey Savvateev visited HSE - Nizhny Novgorod, where he gave a popular science lecture on mathematics to HSE students and colleages from other universities.

Savvateev discussed the Fermat-Torricelli's point and its natural generalizations, as well as a recently discovered property of it. As it turns out, these recent purely mathematical results have real applications in spatial economics, political competition theory and some other applied fields.

After the lecture, Alexey Savvateev chatted with students and gave autographs. A video recording of the lecture will be available on the lecturer's channel.

"The Farm-Torricelli's Point and Its Natural Generalizations"

Abstract:

The task of Fermat-Torricelli is to find a point remote from the three vertices of a triangle with the shortest total distance. Torricelli solved it perfectly; the solution is clear when demonstrated and will be discussed in a lecture. This scheme can be applied in other contexts, such as determining the shortest distance between roads in a city road system, since similar problems often arise in various models of spatial and urban economics. The task at hand has a rather interesting fate. First of all, in the case of the four vertices of a square, it turns out that the task of determining the median (i.e., the point that minimizes that total distance to all four vertices) differs from the task of determining the minimal road system!