In December 2009, the European Research Council (ERC) awarded BMS Vice-Chair Günter M. Ziegler (TU Berlin) one of the ERC Advanced Grants in the amount of 1.85 million Euro. ERC Advanced Grants allow exceptional established research leaders in any field of science, engineering and scholarship to pursue frontier research of their choice.

Günter Ziegler's ambitious project explores the "Discretization": Continuous processes  and structures need to be discretized in order to make them accessible for computational methods. But discrete structures are also highly interesting research objects in their own right and studying them can lead to intriguing results when re-applied to continuous structures. One example from architecture is the challenge that comes with trying to build a curved glass roof (continuous) with flat glass  elements (discrete).

Over the next years, Günter M. Ziegler plans to use "Discretization" to build or strengthen connections between very different branches of mathematics. Among them are Ziegler's own research groups in "Discrete Geometry" and "Topological Combinatorics" as well as the group "Discrete Differential Geometry" with the TU Berlin-based DFG Research Group "Polyhedral Surfaces" led by Professor Alexander Bobenko. They will come together with researchers from Numerics and Scientific Computing from the DFG-Research Center MATHEON – Mathematics for Key Technologies and with colleagues from FU Berlin, the Zuse-Institut Berlin (ZIB) and the Weierstraß-Institut for Applied Analysis and Stochastics (WIAS).