Pioneering Projects in Scientific Computing

Each year thousands of archaeological objects are discovered around the world. However, these objects can only be investigated by a few researchers at a time – until now. At the Interdisciplinary Center for Scientific Computing (IWR) in Heidelberg these artifacts can be studied in a vitual representation. This representation allows for optimized visualization of surface structures under all possible light conditions, which offers even better options than the original.

This development was only possible because the scientists at IWR constantly put their know-how in Scientific Computing to use in new fields and don’t shy away from working in interdisciplinary projects with other scientific areas. So it became possible for Assyrologists and Mathematicians to develop new insights and jointly publish results.

Interdisciplinary work does not stop at the university campus: Long standing cooperations with industrial partners wrote large parts of the history of IWR – and lead into the future. Planning new tubular reactors at BASF in close cooperation with the optimization team of IWR is everyday practice at Ludwigshafen. Here, Mathematics is the key technology to compute heat distributions and reaction controls to increase both profit and safety.