International Graduate College (IGK)
Stochastics and Real World Models
Beijing           Bielefeld
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Aims and Scopes

Random phenomena appear in many aspects of the real-life world, in its scientific description and its technological and societal transformation. Sometimes as a small perturbation, but sometimes also as a force of great impact. Hence it is not surprising that stochastics, the mathematical theory of random processes, has grown in great strides since its inception by Bachelier (economics), Einstein (physics) and Wiener (mathematics, information processing) in parallel with the explosion of science and technology in the past century.

Probability theory is a branch of mathematics motivated originally by the study of quantitative rules of random phenomena. In the 20th century, its theory and methods have brought fruitful important achievements intersecting with other branches of mathematics, natural sciences, engineering technology, economics and finance.

There has been an ongoing collaboration between Chinese and German scientists involved in this program for many years in the field of probability, resulting in 59 joint publications based on complementarity in expertise and joint research interests. In 2002, Albeverio, Ma and Röckner, who had been awarded the Max-Planck Research Prize in 1992 for their joint work, organized a satellite conference to the International Congress of Mathematicians which was held in Beijing that year. The satellite conference took place at the Sino-German Centre for the Promotion of Science and, apart from the exchange of scientific knowledge and ideas, one motivation for this conference was to enhance collaboration between research groups in mathematics in both countries. During a round table discussion devoted to this topic it became apparent that there was a strong interest in also including high level teaching and training of young people into future joint activities, in particular with high demand from the students' side in applications such as in physics and economics.

The current research interests of this program include:

1. Dirichlet forms and Markov processes

2. Infinite dimensional stochastic analysis

3. Stochastic differential geometry

4. Stochastic differential equations

5. Random graphs and networks

6. Probability and quantum physics

7. Financial mathematics