Time flies – our CRC is now 15 months old, and a lot has happened since its beginning. In fact, there were so many activities that up to now we did not find time to celebrate the official beginning of our CRC. This was made good for by a two-day event on September 15-16, 2016. On the evening of the first day many PIs, doctoral students, summer-school participants and friends came to celebrate the official opening in the atrium of Department of Mathematics with a common dinner.
KIT‘s vice-president for research Prof. Oliver Kraft had accepted our invitation to join us for the grand opening. After having worked his way through thick traffic on the A8-motorway he honored our CRC through his motivating and appreciative speech. Our CRC is very grateful for the ongoing support from him and the entire presidential committee of KIT. Prof. Marlis Hochbruck (speaker of the CRC) recalled in her vivid and happy speech many anecdotes and interesting facts about the life of our CRC: its initial planning, the formation of the waves-team, the search for topics and collaborators, the writing of the proposal and its successful defence once in front of CRYS and twice in front of DFG-panels. The dinner marked also the end of our first 4-day summer school with many international participants – as Prof. Roland Schnaubelt (speaker of the iRTG) explained in this speech before he opened the buffet.
Our CRC is all about wave phenomena. Therefore science of waves was the topic of the 2nd day. As speakers we had invited four distinguished colleagues from Mathematics and Physics working in areas close to our CRC. In clockwise order: Prof. Barbara Kaltenbacher (U. Klagenfurt, Austria), Prof. Serge Nicaise (U. Valenciennes et du Hainaut Cambrésis, France), Prof. Sebastian Herr (U. Bielefeld, Germany) and Prof. Kurt Busch (HU Berlin and Max-Born Institute, Germany).
Their inspiring talks on their most recent results deeply impressed the audience.
They all wished our CRC a long and happy life with many new and interesting scientific results. Our warm thanks to all the speakers! We are grateful to have such dedicated and knowledgeable scientists and friends as supporters of our CRC.
Wolfgang Reichel (deputy speaker)