Two UT Dallas faculty members in the Department of Mathematical Sciences will spend part of their summer in Germany as visiting professors at the Technische Universität München.

Dr. Wieslaw Krawcewicz, professor of mathematics, and Dr. Zalman Balanov, associate professor of mathematics, are joint holders of the John von Neumann Visiting Professorship for 2012. The Technische Universität München (Munich University of Technology) awards the von Neumann Visiting Professorship biannually to outstanding researchers in mathematical sciences.

Dr. Zalman Balanov

Dr. Zalman Balanov

Dr. Wieslaw Krawcewicz

Dr. Wieslaw Krawcewicz

The aim of the visiting professorship program is to foster international connections between distinguished scholars and the faculty and students of the German university’s mathematics department. The honor includes spending up to a semester at the university’s Center for Mathematics. During their stay between June and August, Balanov and Krawcewicz will give lectures that introduce university students to their areas of research.

“This prestigious professorship will bring visibility to UT Dallas, especially to the Department of Mathematical Sciences and our Center for Nonlinear Analysis,” said Krawcewicz, who founded the center with Balanov in 2011.

Krawcewicz’s and Balanov’s main area of expertise is nonlinear analysis with a focus on symmetric dynamical systems.

Specifically, the research team has developed new methods that address how the symmetries of a system impact its dynamics. Their results have been applied to problems related to a wide range of fields, including population dynamics, epidemiology, magnetic hysteresis, neural networks, fluid dynamics and electrical transmission lines.

Balanov and Krawcewicz also developed the equivariant degree method, which is widely used to study the so-called symmetric Hopf bifurcation.

The visiting professorship is named in honor of John von Neumann, one of the world’s leading 20th century mathematicians. It is funded by the Bavarian Ministry of Science, Research and Art.