COMPUTATIONAL MATH – IDeAS SEMINAR Recurring weekly series · Thursdays, 2:00 – 3:00 PM This week's talk: Speaker: Leticia Mattos Da Silva (MIT) Title: Leveraging Latent Mathematical Structure in Geometry Processing Date: Thursday, March 26, 2026 Time: 2:00 PM – 3:00 PM Room: 224 Fine Hall Abstract: Myriad problems in geometry processing are readily formulated through continuous mathematics, including variational energies, stochastic dynamics, geometric constraints, and partial differential equations. Often, the challenge in solving these formulations in practice is not the absence of a principled theoretical formulation, but that standard computational approaches are limited by design constraints or technical barriers, resulting in instability or poor scalability. Common numerical techniques resort to fragile nonlinear solvers, repeated large optimizations, or forgo analytical or physical properties of the continuous problem. In this talk, I will present methods that tackle these limitations by recognizing and exploiting latent problem structure, including convexity, variational reformulations, and symmetry. After a prelude illustrating the value of this approach in two problems of interest in geometry---simulating elastodynamics and solving PDEs on surfaces---I will describe a new approach to resampling that leverages a time-symmetric variant of the Schrödinger bridge problem. In each of these works, we discuss how algorithmic design, when carefully guided by underlying mathematical structure, can yield numerical tools that offer practitioners greater control and flexibility. About the speaker: Leticia is a fifth-year Ph.D. student at MIT, where she works in the Geometric Data Processing Group under the supervision of Justin Solomon. Her research involves developing numerical algorithms to solve nonlinear PDEs and other dynamical problems that appear in geometry processing. She is the recipient of two MathWorks Fellowships, as well as a Google Fellowship. Previously, she received a B.S. in Mathematics from the University of California, Los Angeles, and in summers past, she has conducted research as part of internships at the Flatiron Institute, at Adobe, Inc. and at the Fields Institute. Up next: Thursday, April 2 – Florian Schaefer (NYU).