GAMM Student Chapter Science Slam

The first GAMM Student Chapter Science Slam took place in Hannover on 30th June 2023. The aim of the event was to promote the exchange and interconnection between the GAMM Student Chapter groups of Bochum, Hamburg and Hannover and give especially young academics an opportunity to present their research in a more casual scope. For that purpose, a single day event was held at the Leibniz University Hannover.

After a joint lunch and the opening, the program started with a keynote talk from industry. Dr.-Ing. Fabian Welschinger (Senior Expert) and Kevin Heiner (Human Resources) presented their employer, the Robert Bosch GmbH. The talk included a Q&A session, Fabian Welschinger highlighting important decisions in his career at the company and Kevin Heiner discussing the importance of different career management skills in a videogame-inspired style.

Following the keynote talk, ten speakers from the different Student Chapter groups presented topics in the fields of material modeling, speed-up of simulations, applied mathematics and biomechanics. Albeit the varying scientific background of the audience, all speakers successfully managed to give an insight into their research. To stay true to the idea of a Science Slam, some talks included jokes, memes, and even a rhyme. In the afternoon, the social program of the event began with a visit to Herrenhausen Gardens. Following this, we had joint dinner in a local restaurant, before the groups returned home.

We would like to thank the GAMM for the financial support of the Student Chapters, making this event possible. Furthermore, we would like to thank Dr. Fabian Welschinger and Kevin Heiner from Robert Bosch GmbH, all the speakers and the local organizers for their valuable contributions to the event.

Mischa Blaszczyk, Christoph Böhm, Hendrik Geisler, Katharina Klioba

SAMM 2023: Scientific Machine Learning

The GAMM Juniors organize the 8th Summer Schools on Applied Mathematics and Mechanics (SAMM), which will take place from 31.07.2023 to 04.08.2023 at Leibniz University Hannover. Under the topic “Scientific Machine Learning”, the school will host lectures from established speakers as well as live coding sessions. The registration is now open and can be found on this site, where also all further information regarding the event is listed. We invite everyone interested in the topic to register now, as the number of participants is limited.

Fall Meeting Braunschweig 2022

In 2022, the major annual event of the GAMM Juniors, the fall meeting, took place in Braunschweig from the 19.09. to 21.09. and was organized by Philip Saltenberger, the second deputy speaker of the GAMM Juniors. The three days were used to get to know each other, especially the new members, present our research, listen to talks and plan future events and activities. Furthermore, group activities and mutual dinners were a nice way to promote group affiliation.

The meeting started on Monday with a video message from Merten Stender, the first deputy speaker of the GAMM, thanking all members for the great work of the last years, making the previous events and activities possible. Additionally, he welcomed the new members. After that, four scientific talks were held by GAMM Juniors, presenting their research to the other members. Following a coffee break, activity reports started. Here, the continuation of currently very successful projects (e.g. PreGAMM, YAMM Lunch etc.) was discussed. Furthermore, new projects were presented, which will start in 2023.

The next two days were used to discuss further topics. Here, especially the new projects “Mentoring program” and “Science communication” were discussed and planned extensively. Another team had the task of collecting possible improvements for the homepage of the GAMM Juniors. After mutual lunch, we listened to two interesting talks regarding working and teaching in academia. The afternoon of the second day was used for the social program. For that purpose, we left campus and took a common boat tour on the Oker, the river flowing around the city centre of Braunschweig. Here, our boatman showed us different sights of the city with a lot of interesting background stories. Finally, we ended the day with mutual dinner. On Wednesday, a final group discussion took place.

On behalf of all members, we once again thank Philip Saltenberger for organizing the event and for the great time we had in Braunschweig.

Mischa Blaszczyk

SAMM 2019: Spacetime Finite Element Methods for parabolic and hyperbolic conservation laws

The classical approach to discretizing time-dependent PDEs are timestepping schemes that, given the problem data and approximate solutions for preceeding time steps, compute an approximate solution for the next time step. For long time intervals, approximation errors accumulate over time and hence the time step has to be chosen prohibitively small for the realization of reasonable error bounds, which leads to tremendous computational effort. Spacetime schemes are based on the idea to treat time as a kind of space dimension, and to discretize time and space simultaneously in a Petrov-Galerkin scheme.
The temporal direction of the information flux is reflected in the choice of the test space. In this manner, time-dependent problems can be tackled with coarser time steps, since the approximation error does not accumulate and grow in time direction, but is quasi-optimally distributed in the spirit of a Galerkin approximation.

On August 7–9, the annual Summer School on Applied Mathematics and Mechanics (SAMM) took place at the Leibniz University Hannover, under the topic “Spacetime Finite Element Methods for parabolic and hyperbolic conservation laws”, with 21 participants from Germany, Austria, and the Netherlands. We were very happy to have Prof. Christian Hesch (Uni Siegen), Prof. Jaap van der Vegt (Uni Twente), and Prof. Olaf Steinbach (TU Graz) as lecturers, as well as Dipl-Ing. Julia Hauser (TU Graz) for the programming tutorials.

The start was made by Prof. van der Vegt, introducing basic concepts of space-time discretization for the advection-diffusion equation and compressible Navier-Stokes Equation. Prof. Hesch gave an engineer’s perspective on the space-time approach with emphasis on the historical background, and finally Prof. Steinbach addressed space-time variational formulations in Bochner spaces and anisotropic Sobolev spaces with application to the heat equation and, extending the approach, to the instationary Stokes system. The lectures were accompanied by extensive programming tutorials led by Julia Hauser.

The summer school was hosted by the Institute of Applied Mathematics at Leibniz University Hannover and financially supported by the same and by the Dr.-Klaus-Körper-Stiftung, and the organization and realization was supported by Prof. Sven Beuchler, Natascha Krienen, Tim Haubold and many others. Participants emphasized that they appreciated the atmosphere, size and structure of the group, the time available for programming, and last but not least, the lectures.
As an organizer, I enjoyed the summer school very much as well, which to organize was a very intensive and instructive experience.

– Philipp Morgenstern

Podcast: GAMM, the Juniors, and GAMMAS

Creating public awareness for science in general but also scientific methods, results, and organizations is an essential task in our current society. We were therefore very excited when we got invited by the Modellansatz podcast to talk about the GAMM Juniors and our newly founded research journal GAMMAS. Thus, in May 2019, we, that is the GAMM Juniors Kerstin Lux and Benjamin Unger, met with Gudrun Thäter from the Karlsruhe Institute of Technolog, who records the pod-cast together with her colleague Sebastian Ritterbusch.

The Modellansatz Podcast tells stories about how mathematics, and more generally natural sciences, enter our everyday life, thereby targeting a broad, and also non-specialist audience. It sheds light on current research topics but also on the personal perspective of individual researchers. Although mathematics is usually associated with lots of formulas, the Modellansatz Podcast offers a different path to dive into scientific mathematics by individual stories of the researchers themselves. For more details about the podcast, we recommend to visit the info page of the podcast.

For us, this was the first time to record an audio podcast, and we were both excited and a bit nervous as well. After everybody was equipped with a microphone, Gudrun Thäter started the recording, and the podcast quickly turned into a conversation about the GAMM, the GAMM Juniors, GAMMAS, and our research interests. After the initial excitement, it felt similar to a coffee break talk, which we are used to from various conferences. For more details about the episode, we recommend to listen to the actual podcast. We thank Gudrun Thäter for inviting us and the friendly atmosphere she created.

Podcast episode: http://www.math.kit.edu/ianm4/seite/ma-gamm-juniors/de

Kerstin Lux, Benjamin Unger

YAMM Lunch 2019: Young Academics Meet Mentors

Due to the success of the previous two YAMM lunches at the GAMM Annual Meetings in Ilmenau/Weimar (2017) and Munich (2018), the GAMM Juniors have organized the YAMM lunch for the third time, taking place during the Annual Meeting in Vienna in 2019. This event addressed young scientists and established experts working in the fields of applied mathematics and mechanics.

During this year’s YAMM lunch, we have welcomed twelve experts who represent different stages of the academic career path. An abundant buffet was served in the Kleiner Festsaal at the University of Vienna, which created a festive atmosphere due to its rich décor. The lunch started with a short opening by the organizers, who introduced all experts briefly. Afterwards, intensive discussions among participants and experts started. In contrast to the previous years, a specific topic was not selected in advance such that discussions were free to evolve about various topics, such as general experiences in science, career strategies, as well as challenges in academia, such as finding a good balance between work in science and private life. Once again, the interest of participants in the YAMM lunch was very high, i.e. all available tickets for the lunch had been sold out rapidly, such that the GAMM Juniors plan to organize the YAMM lunch for the fourth time during the GAMM Annual Meeting in Kassel next year.

The GAMM Juniors would like to thank all experts taking part in this event, sharing their personal experiences and giving valuable advice, thus contributing to the succes of this events. Many thanks of the GAMM Juniors are also addressed to the local organizing committee for their support during the organization of the YAMM.

Johanna Eisenträger, Tobias Kaiser, Christoph Meier