57th European Study Group with Industry

A Study Group is a forum where academic mathematicians work on problems directly related to industry. Workshops of this nature have taken place in Great Britain for a number of years, going back to 1963 when Prof. Alan Tayler started the Oxford Study Group with Industry. The coordination of Study Groups is now in the hands of European Consortium for Mathematics in Industry (ECMI), and the name is currently European Study Group with Industry (ESGI). At a meeting in 1997 of the ECMI Council it was decided that Study Groups should also be held outside Great Britain, and the first one of those was ESGI32 in Lyngby, Denmark.

The format of a Study Group is a week long meeting (Monday - Friday) where a number of companies on the first day of the meeting each present a research problem they believe to be of a mathematical nature. Each such problem is taken up by a group of mathematicians who, together with the company representative, work towards the solution of the problem, through Thursday afternoon. Friday is used to present in a plenary session the results from each of the problem groups.

The reasons for the continuing success of the Study Groups are simple: The industrial participants get, for a very modest sum, a highly qualified `think tank' of mathematicians to focus on their particular research problem. Besides a full or partial resolution of the problem, the companies establish useful contacts with international researchers. The academics benefit from new ideas and challenges from the real world, providing inspiration for both education and their own research.

The success criterion for a Study Group is that participating companies experience the meeting as useful and that it brings them a significant step closer to the resolution of their problem. For the Danish study groups we also have the goal that it will establish closer ties between Danish Industry and Danish mathematicians.