The Ninth ECMI Modelling Week was organized by the Laboratory from August 23th to September 1st 1996. It was a compulsory part for the ECMI (European Consortium of Mathematics in Industry) degree in industrial mathematics. The Modelling Week was organised as a workshop with international groups of about 5 students each tackling an industrial problem provided by a senior instructor. The primary aim for the group was to formulate a mathematical model for their problem. This year the Modelling Week brought together 61 students from ten different countries and twelve instructors. More information on the problems and the results is available in www at http://www.mit.jyu.fi/~ktkar/ECMI. The Modeling Week was organized by Dr. Timo Tiihonen.
The conference brought together numerical analysts, specialists in computational mathematics and software developers who work in superconvergence, post-processing and a posteriori error estimates for finite element solutions of differential and integral equations. The conference was held on July 1-4.
The ESF Summer School on Free Boundary Problems was organized as a part of the sixth International Summer Semester of the University of Jyväskylä last August. The program was divided into four courses of 15-20 hours. The underlying idea was to approach the free boundary problems simultaneously from several different viewpoints that should overlap partially with each others. Thus the course given by E. Fabes (Minnesota) and C. Kenig (Chigago) focused on potential theory and regularity aspects of free boundaries. The course by M. Fremond (CNRS, Champs sur Marne) approached the phase transition problems from the mechanics/modeling point of view, whereas the course by C. Verdi (Milan) and A. Schmidt (Freiburg) concentrated on the numerical aspects of phase transition problems. Finally, I. Fonseca (Carnegie Mellon) considered the mathematical methods used in the study of (especially solid-solid) phase transitions and related microstructures.
The overall number of participants turned out to be more than 40, 14 of which were supported by the ESF-programme 'Mathematics of Free Boundary Problems'. The ESF Summer School on Free Boundary Problems was organized by Dr. Timo Tiihonen in cooperation with Prof. Pekka Koskela from the Department of Mathematics.
The Second Noon2nooN Seminar on Decision Science and Applications was arranged at the Department of Mathematics on December 10-11, 1996. It was a meeting point for Finnish researchers and post-graduate students of several different related research areas. The seminar was organized by Dr. Kaisa Miettinen.
Two minisymposia were arranged in 1996: