This talk concerns applications of differential geometry in numerical optimization. They arise when the optimization problem can be formulated as finding an optimum of a real-valued cost function defined on a smooth nonlinear search space. Oftentimes, the search space is a “matrix manifold”, in the sense that its points admit natural representations in the form of matrices. In most cases, the matrix manifold structure is due either to the presence of certain nonlinear constraints (such as orthogonality or rank constraints), or to invariance properties in the cost function that need to be factored out in order to obtain a nondegenerate optimization problem. Manifolds that come up in practical applications include the rotation group SO(3) (generation of rigid body motions from sample points), the set of fixed-rank matrices (low-rank models, e.g., in collaborative filtering), the set of 3×3 symmetric positive-definite matrices (interpolation of diffusion tensors), and the shape manifold (morphing).

In the recent years, the practical importance of optimization problems on manifolds has stimulated the development of geometric optimization algorithms that exploit the differential structure of the manifold search space. In this talk, we give an overview of geometric optimization algorithms and their applications, with an emphasis on the underlying geometric concepts and on the numerical efficiency of the algorithm implementations.