Category: English

English post

Grand opening of CRC 1173

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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.

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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. Continue Reading →

Travel report: how operator theory and asymptotic analysis met in Bath

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Conference poster

This spring I had an opportunity to visit the UK and to participate in the conference “Operators, Operator Families and Asymptotics” which was held from May 16th to May 19th, 2016. The conference was hosted by the University of Bath and supported by the LMS, the EPSRC and the Bath Institute for Mathematical Innovation.

Looking at the conference title one could expect the meeting of researchers working in abstract operator theory and related “complicated” areas. In reality the aim was different – to bring together researchers applying various techniques of operator theory to the asymptotic analysis of parameter-dependent differential equations and boundary-value problems. The physical meaning of these parameters depends on the situation modelled by the equation. For example, in case of a strongly inhomogeneous media this parameter plays the role a characteristic scale of the microstructure (so, one deals with a problem belonging to homogenization theory). The meeting aimed at making an overview of the state of the art in this rapidly developing area. Continue Reading →

What’s a Waveguide?

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Waveguides have been mentioned a few times in this blog (i. e. here and here), so it seems quite apt to explain (in laymans words) what a waveguide is. As any serious pundit, I will start by quoting the internets source of everlasting wisdom:

„A waveguide is a structure that guides waves, such as electromagnetic or sound waves.“

This, of course, does not really help, since the reader can guess this definition just from reading the word „waveguide“. But we learn, at least, that a waveguide is not a person but a structure, unlike – for example – a tour guide. Let’s try again to find out what a waveguide is by picking the word apart:

What’s a wave? Luckily, due to discovery of the wave-particle duality in the last century, the answer is quite clear: Almost everything is a wave. So, that’s done.

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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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