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Piermarco Cannarsa and Adriana Garroni
chaired by Luigi Civalleri
According to Euler, "nothing at all takes place in the universe in which some rule of maximum or minimum does not appear". Perhaps that's why optimisation problems, in which the aim is to make a certain quantity a maximum or a minimum, have always been a source of fascination. As one can imagine, the field is extremely rich in models and applications, ranging from the most abstract to the most humdrum one has but to think of the search for the shortest way to get from A to B. But it's also very interesting to study the optimisation of certain natural phenomena which, one might say, "spontaneously" resolve maximum and minimum problems. As Pierre de Fermat said, "nature always choosest the shortest and simplest path".
