Amandine Aftalion is a French mathematician. She is a CNRS senior scientist and graduated from École normale supérieure in Paris. She has given talks all over the world, as a specialist of models coming from low temperature physics. She has written a book on vortices in Bose–Einstein condensates. More recently, she has used energy minimization to study an optimal control problem coming from human energy: optimizing running. She has written papers on sports aimed at coaches. Part of her latest results have inspired the first chapter of this book.