Summer School on Nonlinear Optimisation and Combinatorics

From 28 August to 2 September, the Summer School ‘Nonlinear Optimisation and Combinatorics’ gathered 43 students and doctoral candidates from around the globe at TU Braunschweig. The event aimed to shed light on key issues in optimisation research. Nonlinear optimization represents a core area in modern mathematics. Moreover, it is one of the nine key areas of the priority program SPP 2458 Combinatorial Synergies.

The participants of the Summer School. Picture credits: TU Braunschweig

Organised by Prof. Christian Kirches, Prof. Timo de Wolff, Prof. Thorsten Theobald, Birte Ostermann, Nicolas Rieke and Jonas Ellwanger, the Summer School covered a set of independent, but thematically connected lecture series covering general nonlinear optimisation, polynomial optimisation and the intersection of optimisation and combinatorics.

Michael Joswig (TU Berlin and MPI Leipzig) provided a lecture series on ‘The Tropical Geometry of Shortest Paths’, and Pietro Belotti (Politecnico di Milano) and Sven Leyffer (Argonne National Laboratory, USA) gave lectures on ‘Advances in Mixed Integer Nonlinear Optimisation’. Didier Henrion (LAAS-CNRS Toulouse and Czech Technical University Prague) introduced the participants to the topic ‘The Moment-SOS Hierarchy for Polynomial Optimisation’.

In addition to the lectures, the summer school included exercises in groups. In a poster session the participants presented their own research.