The BMS Office is looking for a student assistant (40 hrs/month) to support the BMS One-Stop Office in :
- organisational matters,
- preparing and managing events,
- compiling and analysing data for statistical purposes
- advising applicants and students
- and all matters related to the Application for Extension in the Initiative of Excellence.

We need someone with:
- very good German and English language skills,
- an open and friendly personality, 
- very good communication skills.

Applicants should be very good team players, reliable, able to work under pressure, flexibile and know MS Office products (especially Excel). Experience with official office correspondence and office organisation, LaTeX and mathematics is a plus but not imperative.

Feel free to forward this to anyone who might be interested!

Applications need to contain a cover letter and CV.

Deadline: 4 August 2010!

On July 1, 2010, Professor Konrad Polthier of FU Berlin will succeed Professor Jürg Kramer of HU Berlin as chair of the Berlin Mathematical School. Kramer had been chair since December 1, 2007.

The BMS chairmanship rotates every two years between the three participating universities, FU, HU, and TU Berlin. First chair of the BMS was Profesor Günter M. Ziegler from TU Berlin, who was succeeded by Jürg Kramer from HU Berlin. Kramer and Ziegler will continue to serve as deptuy chairs.

For more information please read the press release from Freie Universität Berlin:
http://www.fu-berlin.de/en/presse/fup/2010/fup_10_216/index.html

The BMS Days 2010 will take place from Monday, February 15th, to Tuesday, February 16th, at the BMS Loft at Urania Berlin!
 
The BMS Days are an ideal platform to meet, to learn about specific graduate projects within the BMS and to get to know prospective new BMS students for Phase I or Phase II. In addition, there will be two very interesting survey talks, one by Professor Jürgen Richter-Gebert (TU München) and Professor Günter M. Ziegler (TU Berlin).

 You can find the detailed program here.

In addition, the BMS Days provide also the possibility to get to know each other and the applicants for the next year, e.g. during our Reception on Monday evening.

Everybody interested in Berlin mathematics is warmly invited to participate! We look forward to seeing you there!

The Press and Information Office of the German Federal Government publishes regular newsletters called "Magazin für...". With the second round of the Initiative of Excellence just around the corner, the latest edition of the "Magazin für Soziales, Familie und Bildung" looked at existing Excellence projects and featured the BMS in their latest edition.

The article is in German, have a look at it here: http://www.bundesregierung.de/Content/DE/Magazine/MagazinSozialesFamilieBildung/084/t3-exzellent-promovieren.html

BMS alumnus Dr. Raman Sanyal was awarded the Berlin Tiburtius Prize 2009 for his outstanding dissertation. In his dissertation titled "Constructions and Obstructions for Extremal Polytopes", Raman Sanyal looked at the properties and constructions of polytopes. Generally, very little is known about the properties of higher-dimensional polytopes with dim > 3. There are construction mechanisms which take well-understood, high-dimensional polytopes (dim > 20) and transform them into lower-dimensional polytopes without loosing certain properties, e.g. number of vertices. This is one way of constructing 4-dimensional polytopes with interesting properties. However, these mechanisms don't always work. Raman Sanyal tried to understand when and why they fail and developed effective methods to describe the situations in which they fail. With that understanding of their geometry a lot of applications, e.g. in linear optimization, can be improved.

Raman Sanyal finished his "Diplom" in Computer Science in 2005 and was one of the first BMS Phase II students. He wrote his dissertation with Prof. Günter M. Ziegler in the RTG "Methods of Discrete Structures" from 2005-2008. Since January 2009 he is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of California, Berkeley.

The Tiburtius Prize was named after the former Berlin Senator for Science and Education Joachim Tiburtius, who served from 1951 until 1963. The prize is awarded annually for outstanding theses and dissertations by the presidents of the Berlin universities. In 2009, three theses and three dissertations were honored and three dissertations received an honorary mention.

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.

The video about the Berlin Mathematical School is the latest addition to the  DFG Video Portal: www.excellence-initiative.com

Check it out  here:

 

The German Research Foundation (DFG) invites you to experience outstanding research at German universities at their Video Portal. The portal was launched on  19 January 2009 and features short videos of all excellence projects as well as current documents and background information.

The Berlin Mathematical School (BMS) is a joint graduate school of the mathematics departments of the three major Berlin universities, TU Berlin, FU Berlin, and HU Berlin. It offers

• a uniform setting for graduate studies (from Bachelor to Ph.D.) in mathematics in Berlin,
• a coordinated, highly diverse course program in English (Phase I, from bachelor to qualifying exams in two years),
• access to all math research groups in Berlin for a PhD (Phase II), in particular, to the DFG Research Training Groups (Graduiertenkollegs) and other ongoing research projects,
• intensive mentoring during the whole duration of studies, and
• support in non mathematical issues ranging from housing to visas and from child care to language courses.

Have a look at our academic profile!

We invite excellent mathematics students from Berlin, Germany, Europe and all over the world to join BMS - and to make good use of the ample opportunities offered by the rich and diverse mathematics teaching and research environment.

Depending on the individual background, admission is to Phase I (typically with a bachelor) or directly to Phase II (for example, for students holding a master/diploma).

Besides striving for excellence, BMS is actively pursuing the goals of internationality, gender equality and diversity: We set the explicit goal to have half of our students come from outside Germany, and to reach a 50 percent representation of female students. The BMS actively and explicitly welcomes and embraces diversity. We will take measures to create an environment that is accepting, liberal, and supportive for its students, faculty and employees. The city of Berlin, with its tradition of multicultural openness, its good relations to the East and the West, and its rich cultural and academic life, provides an excellent setting for this. We are looking forward to your visit to Berlin!

Jürg Kramer
Christof Schütte
Günter M. Ziegler

The BMS was founded in the summer of 2006, started its course program in October 2006. Since October 13, 2006, the BERLIN MATHEMATICAL SCHOOL obtains major funding as a Graduate School in the framework of the German "Excellence Initiative".