Welcome,

It is my honor to present to you the first BMS newsletter in 2008, and to remind you that the deadline for applying to our PhD program is May 31, 2008.

Please apply via our online application.

We encourage students worldwide to the open, multicultural, and diverse atmosphere at the BMS.

Enjoy and please feel free to forward this to anyone interested in Mathematics!

Sincerely yours,

Inside BMS: Helia Niroomand Rad Reports from the BMS Days

On February 18 and 19, the second BMS Days took place at Urania Berlin. This was a great opportunity to meet BMS students and faculty, and to learn about current BMS projects, such as the four Berlin Mathematics Research Training Groups and the DFG Research Center Matheon. All future BMS students were invited to participate and get to know their future surroundings. Helia Niroomand Rad from Iran sums up her expericence:

The BMS Days were an enjoyable experience for me. They were not comparable with other seminars I have participated before, as there are various topics in different areas which were included in it. Everybody with different interests could benefit from BMS Days and increase his or her Math knowledge. It easily showed the future possibilities BMS students could choose within in their education.

Moreover, all people in BMS are kind and helpful which made my travel to Berlin memorable, inspite of the problems I was facing to participate in BMS Days, such as Visa problems. In this short travel to Berlin I have visited TU Berlin, HU Berlin, and FU Berlin as the future atmosphere educated. A warm place with many facilites to help students make the best performance they can. In my opinion, studying in a joint graduate school of three strong universities is an unrepeated experience that could open the progressive doors in Mathematics.

I found BMS a competitive and friendly atmosphere with high level professors and students in a comfortable enviroment to achieve best math goals. Finally, I would like to thank all the people who helped me within visiting BMS: One-Stop Office, my buddies, and all whom I was in touch with.

Life in Berlin: The MathFilm Festival 2008

The MathFilm Festival is one of the highlights of the Berlin Math Calendar. Berlin's Urania will screen math from the science desk to Hollywood, show casting examples of mathematical visualizations and famous math problems. 2007's showings include "Pi - The Movie", "Moebius", "Mesh", "Donald in Mathmagic Land", and "Cube."

Because the 2008 MathFilm Festival will be part of Germany's celebrations during the year of mathematics, the festival will also include an international competition for films and videos about mathematics. A representative selection of films will be shown nationwide in Germany, and a collection of short films will be released on DVD.

The festival aims to attract a broad audience: students, teachers - anyone with an interest in mathematics. Films and documentaries about mathematics and short video dealing with mathematical research or education topics are being solicited. The MathFilm Festival invites submissions from all over the world! An international jury will choose which of the submissions will be presented during the festival. The MathFilm DVD with selected short videos will be released by Springer, and the Festival's best films, as judged by the jury and the audience, will receive awards. For details and deadlines see the Call for Videos.

The festival's organizer, Konrad Polthier, is a professor at the institute of Mathematics at FU Berlin, where he is chair of the Mathematical Geometry Processing Group. He is a member of the DFG Research Center Matheon and the Berlin Mathematical School (BMS) . 

Summer in Berlin? Apply to the BMS Summer School!

The BMS Summer School 2008 will focus on the "Mathematics of Multiscale Phenomena." We invite students with an interest in this field to apply by May 30, 2008. The Summer School will take place at the FU Berlin from September 1 to 12, 2008.

The BMS Summer School will provide an introduction to the theory of multiscale methods, and techniques for averaging and homogenization and associated numerical techniques in particular. The theory will be exemplified by application to ordinary and stochastic differential equations, Markov chains, and partial differential equations.

The BMS Summer School is aimed primarily at graduate students from mathematics and statistics, but will also be of interest to students working in related areas. Postdocs and young researchers are also encouraged to attend. Course material for the introductory lectures will be available in early summer 2008. For students with children of up to the age of 6 years, we will have day care opportunities.

The course will compromise four introductory lectures on each of the following fields:

1. "Multiscale Problems for ODEs und SDEs" (A. Stuart, Warwick; C. Lubich, Tübingen)
2. "Effective Dnamics and Rare Events" (E. Vanden Eijnden, New York; C. Schütte, Berlin)
3. "Essential Behavior of Many-Particle Systems" (A. Mielke, Berlin; H. Yserentant, Berlin) 
4. "PDEs on Complex Domains: Analysis and Numerics" (C. Elliott, Warwick; R. Kornhuber, Berlin)

There will also be several guest lectures by experts in multiscale phenomena, which will cover applications and theory.

Guest lecturers will include A. Chorin (tbc), M. Dellnitz (tbc), G. Eyink, M. Griebel (tbc), K. Gröchening, M. Junk, C. Lasser, A. Majda, C. D. Munz, O. Widlund, J. Xu (tbc).

A parallel summer school on "Multiscale Problems in Fluid Dynamics and Metereolog", hosted by the DFG priority program, will be held from August 17 to September 12, 2008. Lectures and tutorials will be partially shared between the two summer schools.

Applications can be submitted via the application platform until May 30, 2008. Applications must include a letter of interest, CV, a letter of recommendation, and an academic transcript. 

For further information, please contact the course organizers:

Caroline Lasser, Rupert Klein , Ralf Kornhuber, Carsten Hartmann , Christof Schütte

BMS Special Feature: Get Your Own BMS T-Shirt

Finally, it is decided! The unanimous winner of the BMS T-shirt competition is Phase I student David Link.

And here are they: the BMS T-shirts and BMS mugs have arrived! The shirts will be available for purchase for 10 Euro and mugs for 5 Euro in the BMS office.

BMS student Artem Chernikov was the first to get one: he was the winner of the Christmas Riddle and won a T-shirt!

Did You Know What Anna Kournikova and The Jackson 5 Have in Common?

Mathematicians have not only searched and found mathematics in movies or music. One of the most natural and most popular uses of math outside the classroom is game theory. The math behind poker for example can be explained by binominal expansions and basic probabilities. Anna Kournikova and the Jackson 5, for example, are nicknames for poker hands sharing the same basic probability.

For poker homepages created and updated by mathematicians see for example: Brian Alspach (University of Alberta). Alspach specializes in Discrete Mathematics with an emphasis on Graph Theory.

Tom Ferguson teaches math at UCLA and has co-authored several works on game theory as applied to poker with his son, professional poker player Chris Ferguson. For more math and poker see: mathandpoker.com. A comprehensive list of poker hand nick names can be found at thepokerforum.com.

The Upcoming BMS Fridays

April 25, 2008: Gerard van der Geer (Amsterdam):
"Modular forms and counting curves over finite fields"
May 9, 2008: Wolfgang Dahmen (Aachen)
May 23, 2008: Euler Lecture in Potsdam
June 6, 2008: Hans Föllmer (HU Berlin)
June 23, 2008: Eva Bayer-Fluckinger (EPFL)
Kovalevskaya Colloquium

For further seminars and colloquia, see also the Berlin-Potsdam Mathematics Calendar.

You find further information, directions, and a list of former speakers on the BMS Friday Page. 

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