The Discrete Maths Meeting is kind of an "Oberseminar" in the traditional German
university setting. The main difference to some Oberseminars I attended is that
we strive for more interaction, and that we are more flexible. As a consequence,
we meet "on-demand" and advertise this through the Campus
Event Calender two to twenty days ahead. When scheduling a meeting we give
some preference to Tuesday at 14:30 in the 3rd floor rotunda of the MPI.
The aim of this meeting is to provide a forum for exchange of ideas and
discussion of recent results. Contributions usually are from the areas "discrete
mathematics" or "foundations of computer science". A typical presentation takes
not more than 20 minutes plus discussion. If you like to present a recent own
result, recent or classical other people's work or (most-wanted) a new open
problem, please address me.
A subseries of the Discrete Maths Meeting is the DMM-"Battlezone", organized
jointly by Martin Kutz and
myself. Here, volunteers may
give a practise talk, which subsequently is thoroughly analyzed by the audience.
It is hence understood by all participants that
the speaker asks for clear comments on all aspects of the talk. To
make this most effective, he/she is well-prepared to the utmost he/she
is capable of on his/her own (in other words, we don't prepare your
talk, and you don't start to cry if we don't like your talk);
the audience attends to learn how to give talks and to helps others
to give good talks. To this end, no-one should be shy to give also
negative feed-back. Martin and I facilitate this event, but we are not
the teachers here (though, of course, we may also give comments),
the DMM-Battlezone does not replace the Mittagsseminar as means of
communication recent own work. The speaker will present his/her work there
or at another appropriate meeting as well (presumably some time after the
Battlezone).
Why did we introduce this series? We regularly had practice talks in the
Mittagsseminar, where speakers would present a talk they planned to give at a
conference and then hope to get useful feed-back. However, our feeling was that
in many cases the audience was too shy or too lazy to give the appropriate
feed-back. We hope to overcome this with this event.
