Jorge Aguayo Araneda is a mathematical civil engineer from the University of Concepción (UdeC) and, since 2023, he has held a postdoctoral position at the Center for Modeling (CMM) at the U. de Chile, after having obtained the highest academic degree at the U. de Chile and at the Rijksuniversiteit Groningen in the Netherlands.

In 2016, Aguayo obtained his professional degree under the guidance of the researcher and current director of the Center for Research in Mathematical Engineering, CI²MA, at the UdeC, Dr. Rodolfo Araya Durán, who commented that "it has always been a pleasure to work with Jorge, both for his innovative ideas and for his character."

Last Thursday, the 12th, Dr. Aguayo presented the talk 'New tools for the analysis of inverse problems for subduction earthquakes', in the context of the colloquia regularly organized by the Department of Mathematical Engineering at the UdeC.

"The presentation," commented the speaker, "shows a story about how to analyze inverse problems and how it is applied to the detection of faults or seismic jumps with theoretical results that show that the problem is well set, it is stable, except for the problems for which I cannot correctly recover the fault in the complete domain, which are at the extremes."

"In this, we have been working with Rodolfo in this last stage, we found a good solver and good tools that allow us to reduce the use of memory and the number of degrees of freedom, simplifying the problem to solve, curiously, more complex problems," Aguayo explained and explained that these advances have already given rise to three articles that are in pre-publication.

Applications in Earth Sciences

During his one-week stay at the UdeC, fully funded by the CMM, Aguayo met, together with Prof. Araya, with the researcher and academic of the Department of Earth Sciences (Faculty of Chemical Sciences) Dr. Andrés Tassara Oddo, a geologist specializing in seismic networks and seismotectonic and seismovolcanic activity.

"There are serious possibilities of working together," Aguayo commented, "among them, being able to scale these results to 3D examples, increasingly more realistic and reaching better applications, with real meshes and parameters closer to reality."

"Doing mathematics at the service of other sciences and of people, in general, is a goal that is difficult to achieve. We are aware of this and of the limitations, but the idea is to try to reduce them so that this work is a tool for other scientists. We are committed to making this more expeditious so that geologists and geophysicists can use these tools and apply them to their studies of earthquakes, in general."

In this sense, Prof. Araya highlighted that "with colleagues from Earth sciences we have been collaborating for several years, which has resulted in scientific articles, joint projects and co-direction of undergraduate and graduate theses" and anticipated that, currently, they intend to apply for funds for the formation of an interdisciplinary group to address these issues.

"The idea is to form a research group in mathematical modelling of problems from Earth sciences, thus taking advantage of the experience gained in previous collaborative projects. I think we are in a good position to apply to a millennium institute or another equivalent source. We will see what kind of competitions will be opened in the near future," explained the director of CI²MA.