About functions, random walks and finding paths

On Thursday, September 28, 2023, a teacher training course on the above topic will take place at the Institute of Mathematics at Clausthal University of Technology, Erzstraße 1, from 9.30 a.m. to 4.15 p.m., in cooperation with the Competence Center for Teacher Training Braunschweig (KLBS), to which we cordially invite you. The cost of participation is 25 euros per participant and will be charged via the KLBS.

Registration is possible at http://vedab.nibis.de possible. Direct link:

https://vedab.de/veranstaltungsdetails.php?vid=139191

About the content:
At the Mathematics Symposium, there will be three specialist presentations on traditional mathematics teaching content and current topics from research by experts, followed by a discussion.

Dr. Marie-Christine Von der Bank
Experiencing functional relationships Functions are one of the classic contents of mathematics lessons. We encounter functional relationships (sometimes somewhat hidden) in many situations:

Think, for example, of the area of a triangle, which depends linearly on the length of the base side or the height if the other length is kept constant. In this way, functional relationships also enable mathematical argumentation beyond function terms. Examples of problems demonstrate how effective the interplay between the primarily verbal-conceptual and constructive-geometric language of mathematics is. Particular attention is paid to a tried and tested task format: the function puzzle. Please bring a device with GeoGebra with you.


Prof. Dr. Aleksandra Zimmermann
Of random walks and Markov chains:

A simple variant of a random walk is the random movement of a particle on the integers. Starting from a starting point, it moves to the left or right with a probability of 1/2. This random movement of the particle is memoryless; the information about its next position depends on its current position, but not on its positions in the past. Markov chains are stochastic processes with a discrete state space whose future temporal development depends exclusively on the counterpart and does not take the past into account. They therefore have a particularly clear mathematical structure, which can be described using linear algebra and is often visualized with the help of graphs. For this reason, the theory of Markov chains has numerous applications in physics, biology, engineering, computer science, finance, economics and social sciences. Selected application examples will be presented in this lecture.


Dr. Christoph Hansknecht
Finding paths made easy

The "shortest path problem" is an optimization problem whose importance can hardly be overestimated: Procedures for determining shortest paths can be found in all navigation software, regardless of whether routes are determined for roads or railways. Since the size of the underlying networks has grown considerably in recent years, but the calculation of shortest paths must be carried out with relatively limited resources, algorithmic advances are worth their weight in gold in the truest sense of the word. Various developments have made it possible to accelerate processes to such an extent that runtimes have dropped from seconds to the micro- and nanosecond range. In my talk, I will trace this progress and explain the key innovations and ideas.

 


Program:

09:30 - 09:45Welcome
09:45 - 10:30Experiencing functional relationships (Part 1)
Dr Marie-Christine Von der Bank (Chair of Mathematics and its Didactics, Saarland University)
10:30 - 11:00Coffee break
11:00 - 11:45Experiencing functional relationships (Part 2)
Dr Marie-Christine Von der Bank
11:45 - 13:15Lunch break
13:15 - 14:15Of random walks and Markov chains
Prof. Dr. Aleksandra Zimmermann
14:15 - 14:45Coffee break
14:45 - 15:45Finding paths made easy
Dr. Christoph Hansknecht
15:45 - 16:15Discussion and closing remarks

 


Materials: