Biannual Report - Fachbereich Mathematik - Technische Universität ...

The department is involved in two current DFG-Sonderforschungsbereiche of our university:
SFB 805, Control of Uncertainties in Load-Carrying Structures in Mechanical Engineering,
for which funding was extended in 2012, and SFB 666, Integral Sheet Metal Design with
Higher Order Bifurcations. Another Sonderforschungsbereich the department was involved
in, SFB 568, Flow and Combustion in Future Gas Turbine Cobustion Chambers, reached the
end of its funding in December 2011. Third party funding for these and other projects
has grown by about a factor 10 over the last decade, and now exceeds 4 million euros per
annum. Our report gives an impression of all these and many more activities by members
of our department.
Teaching is another important part of our work, and we can claim to teach more students
and to have more graduates than most other mathematics departments in Germany. We
place particular emphasis on the quality of our teaching, for instance by complementing
lectures with small exercise groups – not just for our own students, but also for the engineering
and science students we teach in mathematics. Our efforts are rewarded in various
rankings and through the preference applicants give to our department.
Over the past years, our department and the university at large have been faced with a vast
increase in student numbers. Admission numbers of other departments can have dramatic
effects on courses taught by our department. In some cases we even had to deal with class
sizes that far exceeded the seating capacity of available lecture halls.
We have experienced only a moderate increase of students in the mathematics degree
schemes, but also here, the large number of drop-outs has been perceived as a problem. To
ascertain that students admitted to study programmes in mathematics meet our standards,
both in terms of motivation and prerequisites, the department introduced new admission
procedures in 2011, involving a so-called Eignungsfeststellungsverfahren. Below a certain
level of baccalaureate grades, applicants are now invited for an interview. Although the
vast majority of applicants interviewed are accepted, we suspect that the procedure will
have substantial impact on the selection and performance of our Bachelor cohorts; this
effect may be even stronger for the teaching degrees (Lehramt). The department will
monitor the effects of this new measure.
In 2011 the department had its Bachelor and Master degree schemes re-accredited by the
agency Asiin. As observed by Asiin, we are facing a particular challenge in balancing
our high teaching load towards other departments with the demands of our own degree
schemes. By terminating admission of new Bachelor students to mathematics programmes
in the summer, the department has managed to strengthen its Master programme and to
retain attractive features of its Bachelor programme, such as the bilingual stream.
With two separate locations in town, the department now has the volume of rooms it
needs. Nevertheless the split in location is unfortunate for our daily work – we look forward
to being reunited in a common building, as promised by our university, before 2020.
We hope that the present biannual report contains the information that you, the reader,
are interested in and thank you for your interest in our work.
Burkhard Kümmerer, Karsten Grosse-Brauckmann, Martin Otto
(Dean, Vice-Dean, Dean of Studies of the Department of Mathematics)
4 Preface