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Contact me: Here!

Teaching:

In the winter semester 2026/2027 I will teach the following classes:

• Lecture "Mathe III für Maschinenwesen" (Mathematics for mechanical engineers, Part III, in German)
• Lecture "Vorlesung Einführung in die Numerik (NM10)" (Introduction to numerical analysis, in German)
• Lecture The nonlinear Reissner-Mindlin shell model (in English). For all those who want to learn more nonlinear mechanics.
• Seminar "Wissenschaftliche Literatur (WL20)". With topics (mainly) from the book How to solve it on (mainly) optimization.

Science News:

• Apr 16, 2026: The paper How to Project onto SL(n) (with Patrick Jaap) has been published in the Journal of Optimization Theory and Applications.

• Feb 25, 2026: The paper Two-Phase Calculation of Second Derivatives for Fixed-Point Iterations (with Andrea Walther) has been published in the Proceedings of the 2024 International Conference on Algorithmic Differentiation.

• Dec 17, 2025: The paper High-Order Integration on Regular Triangulated Manifolds Reaches Superalgebraic Approximation Rates Through Cubical Reparametrizations (with Gentian Zavalani and Michael Hecht) has appeared in SIAM Journal on Numerical Analysis.

• Nov 8-29, 2025: I gave a course on Numerical Methods for PDEs at AIMS Cameroon.

• Oct 30, 2025: I gave a talk on "Finsler geodesics and finite-strain plasticity" at the EDDY Research Training group at RWTH Aachen.

•  Sep 30, 2025: The preprint Finite element discretizations of bending plates with prestrained microstructure (with Klaus Böhnlein and Stefan Neukamm) has been uploaded to arXiv.

• Sep 5, 2025: I gave a talk on "Proximal Newton Methods for Rate-Independent Systems" at ENUMATH 2025 in Heidelberg.

• Aug 13, 2025: The preprint Concepts for Composing Finite Element Function Space Bases (with Christian Engwer, Carsten Gräser, Steffen Müthing, and Simon Praetorius) has been uploaded to arXiv. It is a modern rewrite of Function space bases in the dune-functions module.

• Jul 3, 2025: I gave a talk on "Finsler geodesics and finite-strain plasticity" at HU Berlin, on invitation of Andrea Walther.

• Jun 30, 2025: The preprint The Distributed and Unified Numerics Environment (DUNE), Version 2.10 (with Markus Blatt, Samuel Burbulla, Ansgar Burchardt, Andreas Dedner, Christian Engwer, Carsten Gräser, Christoph Grüninger, Robert Klöfkorn, Timo Koch, Santiago Ospina De Los Ríos, Simon Praetorius) has been uploaded to arXiv.

• Jun 26, 2025: I gave a talk on "Symmetric Spaces and Finite-Strain Plasticity" at the 30th Biennial Numerical Analysis Conference in Glasgow.

• Feb 7, 2025: The paper Benchmarking Numerical Algorithms for Harmonic Maps into the Sphere (with Sören Bartels, Klaus Böhnlein, and Christian Palus) has been accepted by the Journal of Numerical Mathematics.

• Jan 31, 2025: I gave a talk on "Formation of wrinkles on a coated substrate" at the GAMM Seminar on Microstructures at HU Berlin.

• Jan 31, 2025: The preprint How to project onto SL(n) (with Patrick Jaap) has been uploaded to arXiv.

• Jan 18, 2025: The preprint Quasiconvex relaxation of planar Biot-type energies and the role of determinant constraints (with Robert J. Martin, Ionel-Dumitrel Ghiba, Maximilian Köhler, Daniel Balzani, and Patrizio Neff) has been uploaded to arXiv.

• Oct 31, 2024: I gave a talk on "Geometric Finite Elements" at the seminar of Tabea Tscherpel at TU Darmstadt.

• Oct 27, 2024: The preprint Benchmarking Numerical Algorithms for Harmonic Maps into the Sphere (with Sören Bartels, Klaus Böhnlein, and Christian Palus) has seen a major update, and is now finally submitted to a journal.

• Jul 4, 2024: The article Dimension-reduced mathematical modeling of self-shaping wooden composite bilayers (with Klaus Böhnlein, Stefan Neukamm, and Markus Rüggeberg) has been published in Wood Material Science & Engineering.

• May 22, 2024: I gave a talk entitled "Discretization methods for large-strain director shells" at the SIAM Materials conference in Pittsburgh, PA.

• Apr 9, 2024: The article Kinetically controlled metal-elastomer nanophases for environmentally resilient stretchable electronics (with Soosang Chae, Andreas Fery, Lisa Julia Nebel, and lots of others) has been published in Nature Communications.

• Mar 20, 2024: The article Representative Volume Element Approximations in Elastoplastic Spring Networks (with Sabine Haberland, Patrick Jaap, Stefan Neukamm, and Mario Varga) has been published in SIAM Multiscale Modeling & Simulation

• Mar 1, 2024: Robert Bauer successfully defended his PhD thesis on Error Analysis for Geometric Finite Element Discretizations of a Cosserat Rod Optimization Problem.

• Feb 8, 2024: I gave a talk entitled "The TNNMG and BFGS methods for solving small-strain phase-field fracture equations" at the 9th GAMM Workshop on Phase-field Modeling, TU Dresden.

• Jan 23, 2024: I gave a talk entitled "Polynomial interpolation in Riemannian manifolds and Lie groups" in the Seminar "Geometrie" at the Institute for Geometry of TU Dresden.

• Dec 8, 2023: Lisa Julia Nebel successfully defended her PhD thesis on Formation of Wrinkles on a Coated Substrate.

• Nov 23, 2023: The preprint High-Order Integration on regular triangulated manifolds reaches Super-Algebraic Approximation Rates through Cubical Re-parameterizations (with Gentian Zavalani and Michael Hecht) has been uploaded to arXiv.

• Nov 6, 2023: I gave a talk entitled What do numerical analysts need the Koszul complex for? in the Seminar "Geometric Methods in Mathematics" at the Institute for Geometry of TU Dresden.

• Aug 23, 2023: The article A geometrically nonlinear Cosserat shell model for orientable and non-orientable surfaces: Discretization with geometric finite elements (with Lisa Julia Nebel, Mircea Bîrsan, and Patrizio Neff) has been published in Computer Methods in Applied Mechanics and Engineering

• Aug 21, 2023: Patrick Jaap successfully defended his PhD thesis on Efficient and Globally Convergent Minimization Algorithms for Small- and Finite-Strain Plasticity Problems.

• Jun 2, 2023: I gave a talk on "An inexact Proximal Newton Method for energetic finite strain plasticity models" at the GAMM Jahrestagung in Dresden.

• May 20, 2023: The article Truncated nonsmooth Newton multigrid for phase-field brittle-fracture problems, with analysis (with Carsten Gräser and Daniel Kienle) has been published in Computational Mechanics.

• Apr 24, 2023: The preprint A geometrically nonlinear Cosserat shell model for orientable and non-orientable surfaces: Discretization with geometric finite elements (with Lisa Julia Nebel, Mircea Bîrsan, and Patrizio Neff) has been uploaded to arXiv.

• Mar 16, 2023: I gave a talk on "An inexact Proximal Newton Method for energetic finite strain plasticity models" at the SIGOPT conference, in Cottbus.

• Mar 1, 2023: I gave a talk entitled "Towards conforming discretizations for bending shell problems" at the SIAM Conference on Computational Science and Engineering, in Amsterdam.

• Feb 21, 2023: Ruth Schöbel successfully defended her PhD thesis on "PFASST and Newton-Multigrid methods for nonlinear time-dependent problems".

Older news

Bachelor and Master theses:

• Overview

Getting started with Dune:

I have written a book on the DUNE software system, which is published by Springer Verlag. The friendly folks at Springer gave their permission to publish the chapter on how to get started with DUNE right here as well.