Options for schools

The Department of Mathematics runs a variety of activities for school pupils interested in maths. These include:

Lectures for Schools
We are also happy to visit schools to give interesting lectures on maths or give a lecture for school classes coming to our university. These lectures are suitable for pupils in 6th grade and above (taken as an elective, for instance) and cover a wide variety of topics, including well-known mathematical puzzles and recent research.

A list of topics can be found below. If you are interested in finding out more, just get in touch!
Holiday research placement
For anyone with a particular interest in finding out about day-to-day mathematical research activities, they have the option of spending a month during the summer holidays (usually in July/August) on a holiday research placement in the department. Further details about this and information about the organisational process can be found here.
TeWi student prizes
The Faculty of Technical Sciences awards the TeWi student prizes for outstanding pre-scientific theses at AHS or diploma theses at BHS. Within this framework, the three best theses in mathematics are also awarded. All further details can be found here (Link in German).
Degree programme tasters
School pupils interested in finding out more about studying maths at university have the opportunity to do just that! Within the framework of the student union’s Degree programme tasters scheme, it is possible for pupils to attend individual lecture units, in which (for the most part) contents are dealt with that don’t have any particular requirements. Each semester, we usually offer one or two such lecture units for our Bachelor’s in Technical Mathematics. Details about the programme and registration can be found here.
Pupils to Universities
Through the “Schüler*innen an die Hochschulen” university visit programme, young interested high-school students can attend courses and take exams at an early stage, deepen their knowledge of mathematics, get to know the university and shorten their study time. You can find out more about this programme which is run by the Austrian Research and Support Centre for the Gifted and Talented (ÖZBF) here.

School visits: available lectures (selection)

An excursion into the world of cryptography

In contrast to steganography, the concealment of the existence of a message, the aim of cryptography is to encrypt a message in such a way that only the recipient can decrypt its content.
The content should remain hidden from strangers even if the encrypted message falls into their hands.
Over time, people have developed many ideas to protect messages from prying eyes. In this interactive lecture (smartphones welcome), we will look at a few of these forms of encryption together, such as Atbasch, the Skytale, the Caesar cipher and the double cube encryption. We will also discuss how easy or difficult it is to break these ciphers.

Multi-pivot Quicksort

Sorting algorithms are some of the best-studied in the field: so imagine the surprise when a new, faster-than-anticipated sorting algorithm was introduced for Java in 2009. This lecture reports on a current study (with Aumüller, Dietzfelbinger, Krenn and Prodinger), in which dual-pivot Quicksort is analysed precisely for the first time, and presents an outlook on multi-pivot Quicksort (work-in-progress with Daniel Krenn).

Digit expansions in elliptic curve cryptography

When encrypting sensitive data (for example online), one-way functions are often used; these are functions that can be quickly calculated, but the reversal of which is extremely difficult for attackers to calculate. In order to increase security, larger parameter values must be chosen, but this must not increase the calculating time excessively. One approach to speed up the calculations involves digit expansions with negative digits.

Fixing little mistakes: Check digits and coding...or: how to understand IBAN

When entering a long series of numbers such as an ISBN, EAN or IBAN, it’s easy to make a mistake. The numbers can be mixed up or perhaps left out altogether. For this reason, these series of numbers usually contain one or more “check digits”, which are able to identify these sorts of errors. Similar processes are also used when saving data on hard disks or USB sticks, in order to protect against technical defects. In this workshop, the mathematical procedures that are used for these types of check digits are presented, and these are then tried out in practice with the help of examples.

Inverse problems in acoustics

In various technical and medical applications, acoustic waves are used, for example in ultrasound images from inside our bodies. Acoustic noise can, however, also become very unpleasant. Inverse problems, which are practical problems in which the causes for desired or observed effects need to be calculated, appear in a variety of acoustic applications, from the optimal design of medical ultrasound devices to the reconstruction of noise sources from indirect microphone measurements. In this lecture, we cover a wide variety of topics, from applications from our current research to relevant brain teasers for school pupils.

The dynamics of love

Mathematics is known to be both an aesthetic and a useful science. Instead of demonstrating this with the well-known applications from physics, life sciences or engineering, this lecture is dedicated to romantic relations. We present mathematical models based on differential equations that can be used to predict the evolution of romances and discuss them.