Podcast · Tech & Science

Modellansatz - English episodes only

by Gudrun Thäter, Sebastian Ritterbusch · English · Tech & Science

On closer inspection, we find science and especially mathematics throughout our everyday lives, from the tap to automatic speed regulation on motorways, in medical technology or on our mobile phone. What the researchers, graduates and academic teachers in Karlsruhe puzzle about, you experience first

New episodes: Monthly
Typical length: 38 min
Latest: 21 Aug 2026
Language: English

Latest episode

21 Aug 2026 · 30 min

DEI in Math

This episode was recorded in July 2026. Gudrun speaks with Chiara Sabadin. She is currently a researcher in Mathematics Education, with a focus in Diversity, Equality, and Inclusion (DEI) in Mathematics and founder and co-lead of the Women in Mathematics group of the University of Regensburg. Previously, she has completed a PhD in Pure Mathematics in June 2026 at the University of Regensburg, supported by the SFB 1085 “Higher Invariants” and the DFG, with a work on "A cohomological version of Ribet's Method" under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Guido Kings. Even before, she completed her…

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Earlier episodes 29 most recent

19 Jun 2026 · 43 min
Fractional Laplacian
Gudrun talks with Debajyoti Choudhuri. He is staying at KIT as a short term guest. He is Associate Professor in the School of Basic Sciences at IIT Bhubaneswar, India. He did his M.Sc. and Ph.D. in Mathematics at the University of Hyderabad. His research interest lies in the analysis of elliptic PDEs using Functional Analytic and topological methods. In this he touches and has a slight overlap with the research of Gudrun. The conversation starts with the discussion about a small paper which Debajyoti put on the archiv. It is about understanding how to work with the Fractional Laplacian. This…
7 Jun 2026 · 23 min
LLM statistics
This episode was recorded in March 2026. Gudrun speaks again with Nadja Klein and Moussa Kassem Sbeyti who work at the Scientific Computing Center (SCC) at KIT in Karlsruhe. As a new person in our conversation we welcome Nicolas Bianco. The research of the scientists in Nadja's MBD Lab is at the intersection of statistics and machine learning. It spans theoretical analysis, method development and real-world applications. Last time we focussed on Baysian statistics. With the help of Nicolas we want to examplify how interdisciplinary work is done and how his journey led him into this field of…
2 May 2025 · 35 min
Bayesian Learning
In this episode Gudrun speaks with Nadja Klein and Moussa Kassem Sbeyti who work at the Scientific Computing Center (SCC) at KIT in Karlsruhe. Since August 2024, Nadja has been professor at KIT leading the research group Methods for Big Data (MBD) there. She is an Emmy Noether Research Group Leader, and a member of AcademiaNet, and Die Junge Akademie, among others. In 2025, Nadja was awarded the Committee of Presidents of Statistical Societies (COPSS) Emerging Leader Award (ELA). The COPSS ELA recognizes early career statistical scientists who show evidence of and potential for leadership…
1 Jun 2022 · 41 min
Spectral Geometry
Gudrun talks with Polyxeni Spilioti at Aarhus university about spectral geometry. Before working in Aarhus Polyxeni was a postdoctoral researcher in the group of Anton Deitmar at the University of Tübingen. She received her PhD from the University of Bonn, under the supervision of Werner Mueller after earning her Master's at the National and Technical University of Athens (Faculty of Applied Mathematics and Physics). As postdoc she was also guest at the MPI for Mathematics in Bonn, the Institut des Hautes Etudes Scientifiques in Paris and the Oberwolfach Research Institute for Mathematics.…
27 Jan 2022 · 53 min
Allyship
One of the reasons we started this podcast in 2013 was to provide a more realistic picture of mathematics and of the way mathematicians work. On Nov. 19 2021 Gudrun talked to Stephanie Anne Salomone who is Professor and Chair in Mathematics at the University of Portland. She is also Director of the STEM Education and Outreach Center and Faculty Athletic Representative at UP. She is an Associate Director of Project NExT, a program of the Mathematical Association of America that provides networking and professional development opportunities to mathematics faculty who are new to our profession.…
27 Feb 2020 · 45 min
Photoacoustic Tomography
In March 2018 Gudrun had a day available in London when travelling back from the FENICS workshop in Oxford. She contacted a few people working in mathematics at the University College London (ULC) and asked for their time in order to talk about their research. In the end she brought back three episodes for the podcast. This is the second of these conversations. Gudrun talks to Marta Betcke. Marta is associate professor at the UCL Department of Computer Science, member of Centre for Inverse Problems and Centre for Medical Image Computing. She has been in London since 2009. Before that she was…
6 Feb 2020 · 32 min
Waveguides
This is the third of three conversation recorded during the Conference on mathematics of wave phenomena 23-27 July 2018 in Karlsruhe. Gudrun is in conversation with Anne-Sophie Bonnet-BenDhia from ENSTA in Paris about transmission properties in perturbed waveguides. The spectral theory is essential to study wave phenomena. For instance, everybody has experimented with resonating frequencies in a bathtube filled with water. These resonant eigenfrequencies are eigenvalues of some operator which models the flow behaviour of the water. Eigenvalue problems are better known for matrices. For wave…
16 Jan 2020 · 30 min
Pattern Formation
This is the second of three conversation recorded Conference on mathematics of wave phenomena 23-27 July 2018 in Karlsruhe. Gudrun is in conversation with Mariana Haragus about Benard-Rayleigh problems. On the one hand this is a much studied model problem in Partial Differential Equations. There it has connections to different fields of research due to the different ways to derive and read the stability properties and to work with nonlinearity. On the other hand it is a model for various applications where we observe an interplay between boyancy and gravity and for pattern formation in…
9 Jan 2020 · 48 min
Linear Sampling
This is the first of three conversation recorded Conference on mathematics of wave phenomena 23-27 July 2018 in Karlsruhe. Gudrun talked to Fioralba Cakoni about the Linear Sampling Method and Scattering. The linear sampling method is a method to reconstruct the shape of an obstacle without a priori knowledge of either the physical properties or the number of disconnected components of the scatterer. The principal problem is to detect objects inside an object without seeing it with our eyes. So we send waves of a certain frequency range into an object and then measure the response on the…
31 Oct 2019 · 36 min
Peaked Waves
Gudrun talks to Anna Geyer. Anna is Assistant professer at TU Delft in the Mathematical Physics group at the Delft Institute of Applied Mathematics. She is interested in the behaviour of solutions to equations which model shallow water waves. The day before (04.07.2019) Anna gave a talk at the Kick-off meeting for the second funding period of the CRC Wave phenomena at the mathematics faculty in Karlsruhe, where she discussed instability of peaked periodic waves. Therefore, Gudrun asks her about the different models for waves, the meaning of stability and instability, and the mathematical…
17 Oct 2019 · 24 min
Cancer Research
Gudrun talks with Changjing Zhuge. He is a guest in the group of Lennart Hilbert and works at the College of applied sciences and the Beijing Institute for Scientific and Engineering Computing (BISEC) at the Beijing University of Technology. He is a mathematician who is interested in system biology. In some cases he studies delay differential equations or systems of ordinary differential equations to characterize processes and interactions in the context of cancer research. The inbuilt delays originate e.g. from the modeling of hematopoietic stem cell populations. Hematopoietic stem cells…
11 Jul 2019 · 57 min
Batteries
In June 2019 Gudrun talked with Serena Carelli. Serena is member of the Research Training Group (RTG) Simet, which is based in Karlsruhe, Ulm and Offenburg. It started its work in 2017 and Gudrun is associated postdoc therein. The aim of that graduate school is to work on the better understanding of Lithium-ion batteries. For that it covers all scales, namley from micro (particles), meso (electrodes as pairs) to macro (cell) and involves scientists from chemistry, chemical engineering, material sciences, electro engineering, physics and mathematics. The group covers the experimental side as…
22 Feb 2019 · 1 hr 6 min
Portrait of Science
Gudrun met Magdalena Gonciarz in Dresden. They sat down in a very quiet Coffeeshop in Dreikönigskirche and talked about their experiences as scientists giving science an image. Magda started Portrait of science in 2016 with two objectives: to show that science is a process with many contributors at all carreer levels and to have a get-away from a demanding PhD-project, to express her creativity and have tangible results. The person who pointed Gudrun in Magda's direction is Lennart Hilbert, a former co-worker of Magda in Dresden who is now working at KIT on Computational Architectures in the…
21 Dec 2018 · 1 hr 5 min
Energy Markets
Gudrun Talks to Sema Coşkun who at the moment of the conversation in 2018 is a Post Doc researcher at the University Kaiserslautern in the group of financial mathematics. She constructs models for the behaviour of energy markets. In short the conversation covers the questions: How are classical markets modelled? In which way are energy markets different and need new ideas? The seminal work of Black and Scholes (1973) established the modern financial theory. In a Black-Scholes setting, it is assumed that the stock price follows a Geometric Brownian Motion with a constant drift and constant…
13 Dec 2018 · 51 min
Nonhomogenous Fluids
In this episode Gudrun talks with her new colleague Xian Liao. In November 2018 Xian has been appointed as Junior Professor (with tenure track) at the KIT-Faculty of Mathematics. She belongs to the Institute of Analysis and works in the group Nonlinear Partial Differential Equations. She is very much interested in Dispersive Partial Differential Equations. These equations model, e.g., the behaviour of waves. For that it is a topic very much in the center of the CRC 1173 - Wave phenomena at our faculty. Her mathematical interest was always to better understand the solutions of partial…
6 Dec 2018 · 36 min
Inno2Grid
Gudrun talks to Carlos Mauricio Rojas La Rotta. They use a Skype connection since Carlos is in Berlin and Gudrun in Karlsruhe. Carlos is an electrical engineer from Colombia. His first degree is from Pontifcia Universidad Javeriana in Bogotá. For five years now he has been working at Schneider Electric in Berlin. In September 2018 Gudrun met Carlos at the EUREF-Campus in Berlin for discussing the work of Claire Harvey on her Master's thesis. The schedule on that day was very full but Gudrun and Carlos decided to have a Podcast conversation later. Carlos came to Germany as a car enthusiast.…
9 Nov 2018 · 32 min
Micro Grids
Gudrun talks with the Scotish engineer Claire Harvey. After already having finished a Master's degree in Product design engineering at the University of Glasgow for the last two years Claire has been a student of the Energy Technologies (ENTECH) Master program. This is an international and interdisciplinary program under the label of the European Institute of Innovation and Technology (EIT) inbetween a number of European technical universities. She spent her first year in Lisbon at Instituto Superior Técnico (IST) and the second master year at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT).…
19 Oct 2018 · 49 min
Electric Vehicles on the Grid
Gudrun talks to Zaheer Ahamed about the influence of an increasing number of Electric vehicles (EV) to the electrical grid. Zaheer just finished the ENTECH Master's program. He started it with his first year at the Karlsruhe Institute for Technology (KIT) and continued in Uppsala University for the second year. Gudrun was part of the grading process of Zaheer's master thesis "Estimating Balancing Capacities of Electric Vehicles on the German and Swedish grids in 2030". The rising awareness of pollution from transport is leading to innovations within the transport sector. At the moment EVs…
11 Oct 2018 · 37 min
SimScale
Gudrun talks to Jousef Murad about the computing platform SimScale. Jousef is currently studying mechanical engineering at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) and focuses on turbulence modelling and computational mechanics in his Master's studies. He first learned about the existence of SimScale early in the year 2015 and started as a FEA (finite element analysis) simulation assistant in November 2016. Meanwhile he switched to Community Management and now is Community and Academic Program Manager at the company being responsible for user requests and Formula student teams all over…
2 Aug 2018 · 53 min
Mechanical Engineering
In the last two semesters Gudrun has taught the courses Advanced Mathematics I and II for Mechanical Engineers. This is a mandatory lecture for the International mechanical engineering students at KIT in their first year of the Bachelor program. This program is organized by the Carl Benz School of Engineering. Beside the study courses, the school also provides common housing for students coming to Karlsruhe from all over the world. The general structure and topics of the first year in Advanced Mathematics were already discussed in our episode 146 Advanced Mathematics with Jonathan Rollin.…
12 Jul 2018 · 33 min
Dynamical Sampling
Gudrun met the USA-based mathematician Roza Aceska from Macedonia in Turin at the Conference MicroLocal and Time-Frequency Analysis 2018. The topic of the recorded conversation is dynamical sampling. The situation which Roza and other mathematician study is: There is a process which develops over time which in principle is well understood. In mathematical terms this means we know the equation which governs our model of the process or in other words we know the family of evolution operators. Often this is a partial differential equation which accounts for changes in time and in 1, 2 or 3…
28 Jun 2018 · 51 min
Algebraic Geometry
Gudrun spent an afternoon at the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in the Sciences (MPI MSI) in Leipzig. There she met the Colombian mathematician Eliana Maria Duarte Gelvez. Eliana is a PostDoc at the MPI MSI in the Research group in Nonlinear Algebra. Its head is Bernd Sturmfels. They started the conversation with the question: What is algebraic geometry? It is a generalisation of what one learns in linear algebra insofar as it studies properties of polynomials such as its roots. But it considers systems of polynomial equations in several variables so-called multivariate polynomials.…
24 May 2018 · 35 min
Automatic Differentiation
Gudrun talks with Asher Zarth. He finished his Master thesis in the Lattice Boltzmann Research group at the Karlsruhe Institute for Technology (KIT) in April 2018. Lattice Boltzmann methods (LBM) are an established method of computational fluid dynamics. Also, the solution of temperature-dependent problems - modeled by the Boussinesq approximation - with LBM has been done for some time. Moreover, LBM have been used to solve optimization problems, including parameter identification, shape optimization and topology optimization. Usual optimization approaches for partial differential equations…
5 Apr 2018 · 22 min
Singular Pertubation
Gudrun had two podcast conversations at the FEniCS18 workshop in Oxford (21.-23. March 2018). FEniCS is an open source computing platform for solving partial differential equations with Finite Element methods. This is the first of the two episodes from Oxford in 2018. Roisin Hill works at the National University of Ireland in Galway on the west coast of Ireland. The university has 19.000 students and 2.000 staff. Roisin is a PhD student in Numerical Analysis at the School of Mathematics, Statistics & Applied Mathematics. Gudrun met her at her poster about Balanced norms and mesh generation…
29 Mar 2018 · 52 min
Embryonic Patterns
In March 2018 Gudrun visited University College London and recorded three conversations with mathematicians working there. Her first partner was Karen Page. She works in Mathematical Biology and is interested in mathematical models for pattern formation. An example would be the question why (and how) a human embryo develops five fingers on each hand. The basic information for that is coded into the DNA but how the pattern develops over time is a very complicated process which we understand only partly. Another example is the patterning of neurons within the vertebrate nervous system. The…
1 Feb 2018 · 30 min
Turbulence
Martina Hofmanová has been working as a professor at the University of Bielefeld since October 2017. Previously, she was a Junior Professor at TU Berlin from February 2016 onwards, and before that an Assistant Lecturer, there. She studied at the Charles University in Prague, and got her PhD in 2013 at the École normale supérieure de Cachan in Rennes. Her time in Germany started in 2013 when she moved to the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in the Sciences in Leipzig as a postdoc. Gudrun and Martina talk about randomness in the modeling of fluid motion. This topic is connected to the…
16 Nov 2017 · 38 min
Weather Generator
Gudrun is speaking with the portuguese engineer Bruno Pousinho. He has been a student of the Energy Technologies (ENTECH) Master program. This is an international and interdisciplinary program under the label of the European Institute of Innovation and Technology (EIT) inbetween a number of European technical universities. Bruno spent his second master year at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT). Gudrun had the role of his supervisor at KIT while he worked on his Master's thesis at the Chair of Renewable and Sustainable Energy Systems (ENS) at TUM in Garching. His direct contact…
12 Oct 2017 · 1 hr 6 min
Advanced Mathematics
Gudrun Thäter and Jonathan Rollin talk about their plans for the course Advanced Mathematics (taught in English) for mechanical engineers at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT). The topics of their conversation are relevant in the mathematical education for engineers in general (though the structure of courses differs between universities). They discuss how to embrace university mathematics, how to study, what is the structure of the educational program and what topics will be covered in the first semester in Karlsruhe. For students starting an engineering study course it is clear,…
25 May 2017 · 36 min
Cerebral Fluid Flow
This is one of two conversations which Gudrun Thäter recorded alongside the conference Women in PDEs which took place at our faculty in Karlsruhe on 27-28 April 2017. Marie Elisabeth Rognes was one of the seven invited speakers. Marie is Chief Research Scientist at the Norwegian research laboratory Simula near Oslo. She is Head of department for Biomedical Computing there. Marie got her university education with a focus on Applied Mathematics, Mechanics and Numerical Physics as well as her PhD in Applied mathematics at the Centre for Mathematics for Applications in the Department of…

About Modellansatz - English episodes only

Modellansatz - English episodes only is a English tech & science podcast from Gudrun Thäter, Sebastian Ritterbusch. Melo plays each episode straight from the publisher's own feed — no ads added, no account needed — and remembers where you stopped, in this browser only.

Publisher: Gudrun Thäter, Sebastian Ritterbusch
Language: English
Category: Tech & Science
New episodes: Monthly
Typical length: 38 min
Latest episode: 21 Aug 2026
Feed: RSS — paste into any podcast app
Apple Podcasts: podcasts.apple.com/podcast/id1069316145

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