Didier Henrion and M. Hromcik (Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Czech Technical University in Prague, Czech republic) are looking for a PhD student who will participate in research project Polynomial optimization for systems control with aerospace applications.

The PhD position is funded by a grant of the Czech Science Foundation (GA ČR), with a monthly salary of approximately 20000 CZK after taxes. The applicant is expected to reside in Prague, and travel occasionally to Toulouse. Interested candidates are advised to send a detailed curriculum vitae and a motivation letter to Didier Henrion, http://homepages.laas.fr/henrion.

Professor Zdeněk Strakoš has written a short note on the newly established initiative Stichting Euroean Service Network of Mathematics for Industry and Innovation (EU-MATHS-IN). If you are interested in what is the mission and the goals of the initiative, please read the note published in ICIAM Newsletter.

Many of you have just started to write bachelor or master thesis. At this point you should be sure about the scientific content of your thesis. But maybe you are thinking of how to actually write your thesis and present your ideas. Here are some useful hints.

• The thesis layout is specified by Faculty of Mathematics and Physics rules, please follow them. You can even download a LaTeX template for the thesis. Check also webpages maintained by the supervisor of the study programme “Mathematics”.
• Do not even think of writing the thesis using other document preparation system than LaTeX. LaTeX is the document preparation system for typesetting mathematics. End of story.
• Learn how to use citation databases such as Web of Science and MathSciNet. Learn how to export the data from these databases to BibTeX and how to use them in LaTeX.
• Get familiar with some useful macro packages in LaTeX. In particular amsmath package is extremely useful. User’s guide is available here.
• Avoid writing your own LaTeX macros! Your are not the first person writing a scientific text. Many high quality macro packages for typesetting things such as tensors, commutative diagrams, chemical equations and so on are already available. Do not waste your time by reinventing the wheel.
• All scientists are in fact professional writers and storytellers. Get familiar with elements of style for scientific writing. Read at least Elements of Style for Writing Scientific Journal Articles, which is a document prepared by Elsevier publishing house. Maybe you think that the ability to write a stylistically good scientific text is a matter of talent and can not be improved. This is not true. It is a skill as any other and it can be improved by training and practice. The top universities really do bother how their students write and speak, see for example book Writing Science (Oxford University Press) and Science Research Writing: For Non-Native Speakers of English (Imperial College Press).
• Do not forget to backup your work! Your hard disk drive is certainly going to fail one week before the thesis submission deadline.
• Talk to your supervisor even about non-scientific issues (thesis outline, layout, language).

The summer school organized by Graz University of Technology will take place in Graz on September 8-12, 2014. The Summer School is addressed to PhD students and postdoctoral researchers in biomedical engineering, (bio)physics, mechanical and civil engineering, applied mathematics, physiology and materials science and more senior scientists and engineers (including some from relevant industries) whose interests are in the area of biomechanics and mechanobiology.

For further information please see webpages (http://www.summerschool.tugraz.at/) of the school.

SIAM Student Chapter at Charles University in Prague organizes a workshop on applied mathematics. The workshop will be held on March, 20-22, 2014 in Prague. Program of the workshop and further information can be found at workshop webpages.

Martin Kružík is coorganizing a workshop on relaxation, homogenization and dimensional reduction in hyperelasticity. The workshop will take place at Université Paris-Nord on March 25-27, 2014. For futher information please see webpages of the workshop.

Since 2010 Nadační fond na podporu vědy NEURON (NEURON Endowment Fund to Support Science) provides grants for scientists working in the Czech Republic. In 2012 NEURON junior research grant was awarded to Miroslav Bulíček for research concerning regularity of solutions to partial differential equations. The meeting Regularity theory for elliptic and parabolic systems and problems in continuum mechanics is organized as a part of this junior research project. The aim of the meeting is to bring together researchers working in the field of regularity of partial differential equations with a particular emphasis on partial differential equations stemming from continuum mechanics.

The meeting will take place in Telč form 1st May 2014 till 3rd May 2014, confirmed speakers are:

• Emilio Acerbi (Università degli Studi di Parma)
• Andrea Cianchi (Università degli Studi di Firenze)
• Lars Diening (Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München)
• Frank Duzaar (Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg)
• Jens Frehse (Universität Bonn)
• Nicola Fusco (Università degli Studi di Napoli Federico II)
• Stanislav Hencl (Univerzita Karlova v Praze)
• Tuomo Kuusi (Aalto-yliopisto)
• Giuseppe Mingione (Università degli Studi di Parma)

If you are interested, you can find more information at webpages of the workshop.

IRW (Interdisziplinäres Zentrum für Wissenschaftliches Rechnen) Heidelberg is organizing a one week course on DUNE (The Distributed and Unified Numerics Environment). DUNE is a software framework for the numerical solution of partial differential equations with grid-based methods. If you are interested, please register at http://conan.iwr.uni-heidelberg.de/dune-workshop/.