Problem Solved
Real-world applications of mathematics
The story of KNLTB
The Royal Dutch Lawn Tennis Association (KNLTB) was looking for an improved ranking methodology for double players in national and regional official competitions, which has to become a better indicator of the tennis skills and better predictor for results of future matches.
The secret of the beard trimmer
Philips is one of the world's largest manufacturers of hair machinery, from styling tongs and razors to beard trimmers. Those trimmers display strange behavior: at the right speed, the electric motor suddenly hardly feels the counterforce of the blade that shoots back and forth. Philips wanted to know which frequency causes the dip in alternating currents.
Keynote speech: Executable Digital Twins - Integrating the digital and real world
Dirk Hartmann, Herman van der Auweraer
We live in a world of exploding complexity with enormous challenges. Digital twins, tightly integrating the real and the digital world, are a key enabler for decision making in the context of complex systems. While the digital twin has become an intrinsic part of the product creation process, its true power lies in the connectivity of the digital representation with its physical counterpart.
To be able to use a digital twin in this context, the concept of executable digital twins has been proposed. An executable digital twin is a stand-alone and self-contained executable model for a specific set of behaviors in a specific context. In this presentation, we review the concept of executable digital twins, address mathematical key building blocks such as model order reduction, real-time models, state estimation, and co-simulation and detail its power along a few selected use cases.
Finalists BSc category
Finalists MSc category
Some results from more than 25 years of SWI
Experiment with a do-it-yourself leg built from two pieces of wood with foam in between as knee joint. It might not be what you would expect from mathematicians. However it is exactly what they did during SWI2020. Read more (in Dutch)
Study Group Mathematics with Industry 2019 was held at Wageningen University & Research. Topics went from traffic lights and towing tanks to 3D prints in concrete.
And they tried to come up with an approach for determining the weight of turkeys while walking on pressure plates hidden under the floor.
What pleasure it is to drive in a progressive signal system. Of course those traffic lights are not smart by themselves, they contain smart software. And this software is more effective when the underlying calculations are more efficient. Read more (in Dutch)
Examples of mathematics applied by students
The below overview lists all titles of theses by the finalists of the best thesis in applied math award. This shows the variety of societal challenges for which mathematics can contribute in finding solutions.
