Science Journal
On this month’s Science Journal we have the wonders of numbers with maths king Dr. Daniel Král.
How much money did they give you?
“It’s something like 850,000 euros.”
And is that enough for what you want to do?
“Well, in science you can always spend more money, but this is more than I would have been able to get in the Czech Republic, so I’m pretty happy. We are going to hire some post-doctorates, we are going to have some students, we are going to support students at our university. We decided to create some visiting student positions, so we hope to attract students from abroad for a semester. So I think it’s going pretty well.”
So you’re kind of fulfilling a little dream of mine, to make the Czech Republic a centre of science to bring the world here instead of Czechs going abroad.
“Well I think that was happening even before; our group is pretty established in the world, we are running a couple of our projects abroad and we are attracting a lot of post-docs from abroad too, so our group is pretty much international. So it’s not something new, but we can get more such people now and I have more of a word in which post-doctorates I want to hire."
“What we’re doing is on the boundary between mathematics and computer science; we are developing both structural results, which belong to mathematics, and algorithms for different types of problems. So some of the problems which are of interest to us are algorithms that can be used in navigation systems, or development of structural results - basically we are interested in structures that are generally termed ‘discrete’, that means you can separate them into well defined pieces, like if you take, let’s say, the internet, then you can look at computers an d the links between them, so these are the well defined pieces, and we are trying to understand them and develop algorithms for them."
Where practical applications are concerned this is used in programming elevators, for example…
“There were some members of our group who got involved with [programming elevators], and we also have an ongoing student exchange programme with Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratory in Boston, Massachusetts, we send them a student once a year for a semester and there our students have been working on these kinds of problems, like optimising elevators, and other kinds of problems…"
What other kinds of problems?
“Whatever they need, they are pretty much applied, much more applied than our department is focused much more on basic research, which is more fundamental, and we are interested in all kind of problems of optimisation. For instance finding a shortest route, a cheapest solution, the optimal schedule for trains or buses, to optimise the number of kilometres the buses have to run while keeping the passengers happy that the bus is running on time.”
I’ve always thought it must be a hell of a job putting together the tram and bus schedules in Prague to make everything run so smoothly. So there are people working on them from a mathematical perspective?
“I’m not aware of mathematicians working for the Prague transit system, I know there is a group in ¨Germany with which we are in touch, and they have been pretty good at selling their solutions to companies optimising transportation in Berlin, in Munich, and in other German cities. Unfortunately in the Czech Republic we haven’t managed to sell our mathematics to these kinds of companies."
Would you say it’s a good time to be doing mathematics in the Czech Republic?
“I think it has always been a good time to be doing this kind of mathematics, because we have this Institute for Theoretical Computer Science run by Professor Jaroslav Nešetřil, and it’s one of the research centres supported by the Czech Ministry of Education. He managed to make excellent conditions at this centre to convince young people like me to come back from abroad (I spent a year in Germany and a year in the United States), and I haven’t been the only young person to come back from abroad, back to the group. The group is kind of self-growing; he manages to attract some good people and then other good people think ‘if he’s going back, I also want to go back to the Czech Republic work with him’.
“So there already was a kind of infrastructure, so I think it has always been a good time for doing this kind of mathematics in the Czech Republic, and I would just hope it to get a little bit better.”
“Right now I have this grant for five years, I’m very happy to have it and to be able to do this kind of math in the Czech Republic, and I’m definitely not going to run off. And in the future? Well, there are some professors who have jobs in Prague and somewhere abroad, and I think this works pretty well, so that might be one of the scenarios. But you cannot say what will happen in five years."
But you have the heads you need here, so it’s a perfect situation really?
“Yeah, I can’t wish anything better”
