BMS alumni Robert Altmann and Atul Shekhar were recognized for their scientific achievements at the 2016 State Conference of Rectors and Presidents of Berlin Universities (Landeskonferenz der Rektoren und Präsidenten der Berliner Hochschulen).

Robert was awarded the second Tiburtius Prize in the dissertation category for his outstanding PhD thesis entitled “Regularization and Simulation of Constrained Partial Differential Equations”. His thesis deals with the regularization of differential-algebraic equations and the resulting positive impact on the corresponding semi-discrete systems. Robert did his PhD at the TU Berlin under the supervision of BMS faculty member Prof. Dr. Volker Mehrmann and graduated with summa cum laude in 2015. Currently, he is a postdoctoral researcher in the Numerical Mathematics research group at the TU Berlin. His award came with prize money in the sum of 2500 euros.

Atul was honoured with a Tiburtius recognition award for his doctoral dissertation entitled "Rough paths, probability and related topics". The theory of rough paths emerges from numerical methods for differential equations and builds a bridge between analysis and stochastics. Atul completed his PhD under the supervision of BMS faculty member Prof. Dr. Peter K. Friz and graduated from the TU Berlin in 2015 with summa cum laude. Atul is now a postdoctoral fellow at the Indian Statistical Institute in Bangalore. His award came with prize money in the sum of 500 euros.

The State Conference of Rectors and Presidents of Berlin Universities (LKRP) annually awards three Tiburtius Prizes and three awards of recognition to recent PhD graduates from Berlin's universities for their outstanding doctoral theses. The prize-giving ceremony was held at the FU Berlin on 22 November 2016.

Many congratulations to Robert and Atul!

German-language source:
http://www.eecs.tu-berlin.de/zielgruppen/presse/medieninformationen/2016/november/medieninformation_nr_1902016/

The Berlin Mathematical School is ten years old! Established in 2006, the BMS has flourished into a highly successful graduate school currently consisting of more than 200 students and boasting a PhD alumni community of over 210 academics and professionals. In ten short years, the BMS has welcomed aspiring young mathematicians from over 50 countries, reached its goal of 50% international students, and achieved a ratio of 31% female students.

From 17 to 18 November 2016, the BMS held a colorful program of events in celebration of its tenth birthday. The festivities began in advance at the TU Berlin Mathematics Library on the evening of 16 November with a BMS Welcome Reception combined with the opening of "Art on Board: the Beauty of Math". This art exhibition showcases early mathematical prints by Bernar Venet and aquatints from the "Concinnitas Portfolio" and will run until 28 February 2017.

On the morning of 17 November, the main event took off in the Audimax at TU Berlin. Seven talks were given by distinguished speakers active in different BMS research areas. Each plenary speaker was introduced by two BMS students from the same area of research. Prior to each talk, several BMS students and one of the guest speakers gave very enjoyable and moving vocal and instrumental musical performances.

Over half of the BMS student body attended the main event to take advantage of the opportunity to learn from outstanding mathematicians from all around the world. In between the scheduled talks, there was time to socialize with the seven guest speakers, around forty external guests, and over sixty BMS faculty, staff and alumni. At the end of the first day, the BMS student representatives held an (unexpectedly) fun "Math Quiz", which was followed by a buffet reception in the early evening.

The chance to network prior to the main event was not lost as BMS students were invited to take part in a World Café. This event was designed to offer current students the opportunity to meet and chat to BMS alumni and postdocs about various topics such as PhD research, applying for postdoc positions and job availability in the private sector.

In recognition of ten years of the BMS, some of the opening speeches were made up of just ten sentences. The BMS Chair, Günter M. Ziegler, presented ten sentences composed by a BMS alumna in which she emphasized the more profound values of a university education. Opening speeches were also given by Christian Thomsen (President, TU Berlin), Peter A. Frensch (Vice President for Research, HU Berlin), Peter-André Alt (President, FU Berlin) and Steffen Krach (Berlin's State Secretary for Science).

In his closing speech at the end of the two-day celebration, Professor Ziegler held fast to his newly invented tradition and gave ten sentences of thanks to everyone involved in organizing, presenting, participating, supporting and attending the BMS 10th Anniversary events. In a recent interview, he said "The BMS has achieved so much in ten years: it has changed the mathematical landscape in Berlin, brought international students from the world over to this city, and has created a concept and given a face to studying mathematics in Berlin."

The Berlin Mathematical School would like to extend its heartfelt thanks to everyone who has helped to make the past ten years so successful. We are very excited about the next ten years, so watch this space!


Written by S. E. Sutherland-Figini

On 17 October 2016, at the opening ceremony of the 2016/17 academic year, five students and young scientists of Humboldt University Berlin (HU) were awarded with the Humboldt Prize 2016 in honor of their excellent scientific work. One of the recipients was BMS alumna Mira Schedensack who was recognised for her outstanding doctoral thesis. No sooner had Mira accepted one of the Humboldt dissertation prizes, than she was awarded with another prize! On 2 November 2016, the Forschungsverbund Berlin e.V. (FVB) honored Mira with the Marthe Vogt Award. The FVB was just as impressed by her excellent dissertation entitled "A class of mixed finite element methods based on the Helmholtz decomposition in computational mechanics".

Problems from mechanics are often solved using mathematics. For example, if a building engineer wants to know how a balcony will deform under a heavy load, mathematicians can describe this by means of partial differential equations. Usually, the solutions cannot be calculated exactly, so they are approximated using numerical methods. Thus the reliable numerical approach of such solutions plays a fundamental role in the mechanical application. For engineering practice, such procedures have to be easy to implement, deal sparingly with computer resources, and provide the most accurate results possible. For more than 50 years, mathematicians around the world have been researching extensively on how to improve this method, but in this area there was not much new to discover. The best minds had already developed the most efficient methods. Then Mira took up the challenge with an excellent dissertation that presented fundamentally new and sensationally easy-to-implement procedures. In her PhD thesis, Mira abandons the conventional approach to the approximation of PDE solutions and makes use of the characterization of the derivative as a conservative vector field via a Helmholtz decomposition, which breaks down an unstructured vector field into a gradient and a rotation field. Mira explained "There were no simple methods to solve problems of higher order. Whether or not I would find practical procedures was not initially clear, but the theory fascinated me." Mira wanted to do something completely new and not simply improve old methods. "That would certainly have been safer. My approach was risky, but I found it exciting" she said.

As a BMS scholarship holder, Mira did her PhD under the supervision of BMS faculty member Prof. Dr. Carsten Carstensen. She completed her doctorate at the HU in 2015 and graduated with summa cum laude. Currently, Mira is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Bonn's Institute for Numerical Simulation and also a guest lecturer in the working group Numerical Mathematics at the HU.

The Humboldt Prize is an annual award given to outstanding students and young scientists whose final theses are deemed examples of outstanding scientific work. All prizes are awarded by the university president at the opening ceremony of the new academic year. The dissertation prize comes with a monetary award of 3000 euros. The FVB awards the Marthe Vogt Award annually to one outstanding young female scientist who is active in the same field as any of the eight research institutes represented by the FVB. This prize is also endowed with 3000 euros.

Mira, congratulations on your achievements!


Written by S. E. Sutherland-Figini

German language sources:

https://www.hu-berlin.de/de/ueberblick/menschen/ehrungen/humboldtpreis/archiv/humboldt-preis-2016

http://www.fv-berlin.de/news/berliner-mathematikerin-erhaelt-marthe-vogt-preis/newsitem_view?set_language=en

Ágnes Cseh, BMS alumna and doctoral graduate of TU Berlin, was one of six recipients of the 2016 Klaus Tschira Award for Achievements in Public Understanding of Science (Klaus Tschira Preis für verständliche Wissenschaft).

The Klaus Tschira Foundation (Klaus Tschira Stiftung) established this nationwide competition in 2006 with the aim of fostering public appreciation of natural sciences, mathematics and information technology. The challenge presented to young scientists is to write an article about their research and PhD thesis in a way that is understandable to the scientifically interested, but non-specialist person. This year, the jury chose the six prizewinners from 168 applicants in a three-phase evaluation procedure.

For her PhD thesis entitled “Complexity and Algorithms in Matching Problems under Preferences”, Ágnes studied the 'stable marriage problem', which has been in the research spotlight for over 50 years. She succeeded in broadening the scope of this well-known problem in graph theory, which is traditionally illustrated by a mathematical modeling of partner finding. In her winning article, “Marriages are made in calculation” (Heiraten nach Plan), Ágnes describes this model, which has been frequently applied in the business world for decades for the purpose of bringing together different stakeholders in the most optimal way. The wide range of possible applications of this theory includes sports fixtures, living kidney donations, online auctions and the distribution of student dormitories. Ágnes illustrated the existing mathematical model using human partner selection, but her enhanced model is universally applicable.

Ágnes was presented with the Klaus Tschira Award on 6 October 2016 at the University of Heidelberg's historical Alte Aula and is the fourth member of the BMS alumni to receive this prize. Tim Conrad was a recipient in 2009, Jannik Matuschke in 2014 and Timo Berthold in 2015. The award came with prize money in the sum of 5000 euros. In addition, all winning articles will be published in their original form in the popular science magazine “bild der wissenschaft”.

As a BMS student, Ágnes won the “First Berlin Science Slam” in Cairo in April 2012 and, in November of the same year, she won the first prize in the “Best Master/Diplom Degree” category at the TU Berlin's Dies Mathematicus. In 2013, she was awarded the Clara von Simson Prize for her outstanding master's thesis entitled “Stable Flows”. Ágnes completed her PhD at TU Berlin in 2015 under the supervision of BMS faculty member Prof. Dr. Martin Skutella, and graduated with the honor of summa cum laude. After a research stay at the ICE-TCS (Icelandic Centre of Excellence in Theoretical Computer Science) in Reykjavík, she is now a post-doc at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in Budapest.

Ágnes, congratulations on your success!


Written by S. E. Sutherland-Figini

German-language source

Photo of all prizewinners