Travel report: hyperbolic problems in Aachen

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hyp16-participants

Conference photo of the XVI International Conference on Hyperbolic Problems at the RWTH Aachen.

I had the opportunity to attend and participate in the conference “XVI International Conference on Hyperbolic Problems” from 1st to 5th August 2016. This time the conference was organized by the RWTH Aachen University and supported, amongst others, by the DFG.

In my point of view it is commendable that many young scientists took their opportunity to present their own work beside the well-known experts. The talks and presentations were not only about the theory of hyperbolic problems. Many of the talks dealt with numerical analysis and applications of hyperbolic partial differential equations like Euler and Navier-Stokes type equations and conservation laws. Continue Reading →

Speech at the CRC’s opening event on September 16, 2016

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Almost three months have passed since the official opening of the CRC on September 15th/16th 2016. In the meantime many people have asked us if we could publish the inauguration speech given by the spokesperson of the CRC, Prof. Dr. Marlis Hochbruck. We are happy to fulfill this request as a peculiarity on St. Nicholas Day. Here is the speech.

Welcome everybody. My name is Marlis Hochbruck. I am a professor of numerical analysis at KIT since March 2010 and currently I am the spokesperson of the CRC “Wave phenomena: analysis and numerics”, which is funded by the DFG since July 2015.

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History of Maxwell’s Equations

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9th Workshop on Numerical Analysis of Evolution Equations

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From the 8th until the 11th of November a group of 13 people from the KIT went to Innsbruck to participate in the 9th Workshop on Numerical Analysis of Evolution Equations. It took place at the Bildungsinstitut Grillhof in Vill, just outside Innsbruck. The nice location with amazing views on Innsbruck and its surrounding mountains and the great food provided the perfect environment for a successful workshop.

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View from conference location, taken by Simone Buchholz.

What was the workshop about? If you look up the meaning of “evolution equation” on the Encyclopedia of Mathematics, you will come across the following definition:

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Divide and Conquer

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About lasagne, splitting methods and your favourite film

The ‘Divide and Conquer’-principle was already used in the Roman foreign policy. The politicians and warlords of the ancient world noticed that a large group of people can be easier controlled or even conquered if you split them up into several smaller groups.

show an animation of the quicksort algorithm, descriped in the text

Quicksort algorithm: source
CC BY-SA3.0 Roland H.

Luckily the ancient times are long gone, but the principle remains, in particular in computer science.  Many algorithms are based on the idea of splitting a task into several easy-to-handle parts. After solving these simpler parts, the solution of the full problem needs to be reconstructed from the solutions of these subproblems. So, it is possible to ‘conquer’ a complex task.

A famous example is the well-known Quicksort algorithm to sort a list of numbers. You start by picking one number in the list (the pivot element) and compare it to every other number of the list. If the other number is smaller, we put it on the left side of our pivot element, if it is larger, we put it on the right side. Thus, we get two sublists, one with smaller and one with larger numbers than the pivot element. We continue to sort these sublists in the same way with new pivot numbers from the sublists. The complete list is sorted when all sublists are sorted.

You may wonder what this is all about and how this is related to our CRC?

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