Paper detail

Astrophysical Dynamics 1999/2000: Merging Research and Education

The workshop `Astrophysical Dynamics 1999/2000' followed a homonymous advanced research course, and both activities were organized by me. In this opening paper of the proceedings book, I describe them and document their strong impact on the academic life of the local institutions. The advanced research course was open to graduate students, senior researchers, and motivated under-graduate students with good background in physics and mathematics. The course covered several multi-disciplinary issues of modern research on astrophysical dynamics, and thus also of interest to physicists, mathematicians and engineers. The major topic was gas dynamics, viewed in context with stellar dynamics and plasma physics. The course was complemented by parallel seminars on hot topics given by experts in such fields, and open to a wide scientific audience. In particular, I gave a friendly introduction to wavelets, which are becoming an increasingly powerful tool not only for processing signals and images but also for analysing fractals and turbulence, and which promise to have important applications to dynamical modelling of disc galaxies. The workshop was open to a wide scientific audience. The workshop with published proceedings book was, as a matter of fact, the innovative form of exam that I proposed for the advanced research course. The contributions were refereed and their quality is high on average, exceptionally high in a few cases. The advanced research course and the workshop all together produced great enthusiasm in the students and welcomed the participation of a hundred different people, which means an order of magnitude more than an average graduate course at Chalmers University of Technology and Göteborg University.