Keynote speaker: Professor Christoph Helmberg
Chemnitz University of Technology, Germany
Professor Christoph Helmberg was born in Innsbruck, Austria, in 1968.
He studied Mathematics with Computer Science in Graz. In 1991 he graduated as Diplom-Ingenieur in Mathematics from Graz University of Technology.
From July 1992 till June 1995 he was employed at the Christian Doppler Laboratory for Discrete Optimization associated with the Institut für Mathematik B at the Graz University of Technology. He received his Ph.D. in 1995 at Graz University of Technology. His Ph.D.-thesis introduced An Interior Point Method for Semidefinite Programming and Max-Cut Bounds.
In his "Berlin years", from July 1995 to March 2002, he worked at the Konrad-Zuse-Zentrum für Informationstechnik Berlin. Like in Graz, he spent most of his time on research and on industrial projects. During 1997/98 he participated in the organization of the International Congress of Mathematicians Berlin 1998 which - according to his words - was a lot of work and great fun! In July 2000 he completed his Habilitation Semidefinite Programming for Combinatorial Optimization at Technische Universität Berlin, Fachbereich Mathematik. His spectral bundle code SBmethod for large scale semidefinite programming is still available but now superseded by the C++ callable library ConicBundle, which offers special support for Lagrangian relaxation of integer and linear programs over symmetric cones with separate (also nonpolyhedral) cutting models, for primal aggregation and for adding primal cutting planes dynamically.
During a short period, from April 2002 till September 2002, he was a Professor of Economathematics at the Department of Mathematics, University of Kaiserslautern.
Since October 2002 he is Professor of Algorithmic and Discrete Mathematics at the Department of Mathematics, Chemnitz University of Technology.
Professor Christoph Helmberg is a member of the Deutsche Mathematiker Vereinigung (DMV) (contact him if you want to join as well!), of the Gesellschaft für Operations Research (GOR), the Mathematical Optimization Society, and of Deutscher Hochschulverband. In his department's support of the African Institute for Mathematical Sciences he also tries to be of some help.