Month: June 2016

Ein Mekka für Mathematiker – Oberwolfach

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Mathematisches Forschungsinstitut Oberwolfach

“Tübingen, in der Nähe von Oberwolfach”, was für viele Menschen wie eine absurde Ortsbeschreibung klingt, ist unter Mathematikern absolut verständlich. Denn im beschaulichen Oberwolfach im Schwarzwald befindet sich das Mathematische Forschungsinstitut Oberwolfach (MFO). Es bietet Platz für Workshops, Sommerschulen und Forschungsaufenthalte und beherbergt eine der größten mathematischen Bibliotheken der Welt, ein Mekka für Mathematiker. Ende März nahmen sechs von uns am Workshop “Geometric Numerical Integration” teil: neben mir die beiden Organisatoren Marlis Hochbruck und Christian Lubich sowie Volker Grimm, Tobias Jahnke und Katharina Schratz.

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CISM summer school in Udine

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CISM C1602 group picture

Official group picture of the CISM course 1602 (the photo is a courtesy of CISM).

Some persons claim that they are immune to advertising. We (that is Andreas Sturm, Jonas Köhler and David Hipp) can certainly not count us into that group of people: After multiple invitations over the central mailing list, we decided to participate in the CISM advanced school about ‘Computational Acoustics’  organized by Prof. Kaltenbacher (TU Wien) and sacrificed our Sunday and a holiday Thursday for the sake of scientific education.

CISM, International Centre for Mechanical Sciences, is a non-profit organization founded in 1968 and located in the beautiful and impressive Palazzo del Torso in Udine, Italy. The principal activity of CISM is the organization of courses, seminars, workshops and conferences to promote the exchange and application of advanced knowledge in mechanical science and in particular fields like robotics, biomechanics and environmental engineering.

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Travel Report: GRK 1838 Workshop – Quantum Dynamics and Functional Inequalities

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Blaubeuren Workshop 2016 Poster (with kind permission of RTG 1838)

Blaubeuren Workshop 2016 Poster (with kind permission of RTG 1838)

In March 2016, we, that is a small delegation of the applied analysis workgroup at KIT (Ioannis Anapolitanos, Leonid Chaichenets, Michael Hott, Johanna Richter, and Tobias Ried), had the opportunity to participate in a workshop on Quantum Dynamics and Functional Inequalities, organised by the Stuttgart/Tübingen RTG 1838 “Spectral Theory and Dynamics of Quantum Systems”. It covered a very diverse range of topics from mathematical physics:

Benjamin Schlein (University of Zurich) gave an introduction to the derivation of effective equations for quantum systems with a large number of particles. In the case of bosons this leads to a description of the dynamics of Bose-Einstein condensates.

The connection between functional inequalities and geometric problems, as well as their application in kinetic theory, were discussed by Michael Loss (Georgia Institute of Technology).

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How time flies – first annual meeting of the CRC

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Group photo

Almost one year has passed since the start of the Collaborative Research Center (CRC) 1173 – time for the First Annual Meeting. It took place in the Bildungshaus St. Bernhard in Rastatt from April 4th till April 8th. About 70 people – from Ph.D. students to professors – took part. Most of them were from the KIT Department of Mathematics, while some came from Stuttgart and Tübingen, and from the KIT Departments of Physics and Electrical Engineering.

Scene from the poster session

Poster session

The most important part of the meeting were the scientific talks. Each project was presented by an overview talk, which was given by one or two of its principal investigators. Additionally, several of the Ph.D. students got the opportunity to present the current state of their research.

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Electromagnetic chirality

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Dr. Ivan Fernandez-Corbaton from the Institute of Nanotechnology at the KIT presented his research in our CRC seminar April 21st. We are very happy to share his own short recap of his exciting talk on the question “How Electromagnetic Chiral is a Chiral Object?” with you:

Dr. Ivan Fernandez-Corbaton:
‘Take an object and place it in front of a mirror. If the “being in the other side of the mirror” handed you their version of the object, there are two possibilities: You can rotate it so that it is now identical to your original object, or you cannot. If you cannot, the object is called chiral. Try it at home with a wine opener and you will see that you will never be able to superimpose the two helices because they twist in opposite senses, as the two seashells in the picture.

This seashell is a chiral objects. Source: Wikipedia.Org (http://bit.ly/26oKa4e)

These seashells are chiral. Source: Wikipedia.Org

Chirality is entrenched in nature: From the weak interactions between elementary particles to the empirical fact that most of the building blocks inside the human body are chiral (aminoacids, proteins, the DNA strands and many more).

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