@phdthesis{Le2006,
  author    = {Le, Tuan Anh},
  title     = {Applying realistic mathematics education in Vietnam : teaching middle school geometry},
  url       = {http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus-13480},
  school      = {Universit{\"a}t Potsdam},
  year      = {2006},
  abstract  = {Since 1971, the Freudenthal Institute has developed an approach to mathematics education named Realistic Mathematics Education (RME). The philosophy of RME is based on Hans Freudenthal's concept of 'mathematics as a human activity'. Prof. Hans Freudenthal (1905-1990), a mathematician and educator, believes that 'ready-made mathematics' should not be taught in school. By contrast, he urges that students should be offered 'realistic situations' so that they can rediscover from informal to formal mathematics. Although mathematics education in Vietnam has some achievements, it still encounters several challenges. Recently, the reform of teaching methods has become an urgent task in Vietnam. It appears that Vietnamese mathematics education lacks necessary theoretical frameworks. At first sight, the philosophy of RME is suitable for the orientation of the teaching method reform in Vietnam. However, the potential of RME for mathematics education as well as the ability of applying RME to teaching mathematics is still questionable in Vietnam. The primary aim of this dissertation is to research into abilities of applying RME to teaching and learning mathematics in Vietnam and to answer the question "how could RME enrich Vietnamese mathematics education?". This research will emphasize teaching geometry in Vietnamese middle school. More specifically, the dissertation will implement the following research tasks: • Analyzing the characteristics of Vietnamese mathematics education in the 'reformed' period (from the early 1980s to the early 2000s) and at present; • Implementing a survey of 152 middle school teachers' ideas from several Vietnamese provinces and cities about Vietnamese mathematics education; • Analyzing RME, including Freudenthal's viewpoints for RME and the characteristics of RME; • Discussing how to design RME-based lessons and how to apply these lessons to teaching and learning in Vietnam; • Experimenting RME-based lessons in a Vietnamese middle school; • Analyzing the feedback from the students' worksheets and the teachers' reports, including the potentials of RME-based lessons for Vietnamese middle school and the difficulties the teachers and their students encountered with RME-based lessons; • Discussing proposals for applying RME-based lessons to teaching and learning mathematics in Vietnam, including making suggestions for teachers who will apply these lessons to their teaching and designing courses for in-service teachers and teachers-in training. This research reveals that although teachers and students may encounter some obstacles while teaching and learning with RME-based lesson, RME could become a potential approach for mathematics education and could be effectively applied to teaching and learning mathematics in Vietnamese school.},
  language  = {en}
}
@phdthesis{Abed2010,
  author    = {Abed, Jamil},
  title     = {An iterative approach to operators on manifolds with singularities},
  url       = {http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus-44757},
  school      = {Universit{\"a}t Potsdam},
  year      = {2010},
  abstract  = {We establish elements of a new approach to ellipticity and parametrices within operator algebras on manifolds with higher singularities, only based on some general axiomatic requirements on parameter-dependent operators in suitable scales of spaes. The idea is to model an iterative process with new generations of parameter-dependent operator theories, together with new scales of spaces that satisfy analogous requirements as the original ones, now on a corresponding higher level. The "full" calculus involves two separate theories, one near the tip of the corner and another one at the conical exit to infinity. However, concerning the conical exit to infinity, we establish here a new concrete calculus of edge-degenerate operators which can be iterated to higher singularities.},
  language  = {en}
}
@phdthesis{Zass2021,
  author    = {Zass, Alexander},
  title     = {A multifaceted study of marked Gibbs point processes},
  doi       = {10.25932/publishup-51277},
  url       = {http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus4-512775},
  school      = {Universit{\"a}t Potsdam},
  pages     = {vii, 104},
  year      = {2021},
  abstract  = {This thesis focuses on the study of marked Gibbs point processes, in particular presenting some results on their existence and uniqueness, with ideas and techniques drawn from different areas of statistical mechanics: the entropy method from large deviations theory, cluster expansion and the Kirkwood--Salsburg equations, the Dobrushin contraction principle and disagreement percolation. We first present an existence result for infinite-volume marked Gibbs point processes. More precisely, we use the so-called entropy method (and large-deviation tools) to construct marked Gibbs point processes in R^d under quite general assumptions. In particular, the random marks belong to a general normed space S and are not bounded. Moreover, we allow for interaction functionals that may be unbounded and whose range is finite but random. The entropy method relies on showing that a family of finite-volume Gibbs point processes belongs to sequentially compact entropy level sets, and is therefore tight. We then present infinite-dimensional Langevin diffusions, that we put in interaction via a Gibbsian description. In this setting, we are able to adapt the general result above to show the existence of the associated infinite-volume measure. We also study its correlation functions via cluster expansion techniques, and obtain the uniqueness of the Gibbs process for all inverse temperatures β and activities z below a certain threshold. This method relies in first showing that the correlation functions of the process satisfy a so-called Ruelle bound, and then using it to solve a fixed point problem in an appropriate Banach space. The uniqueness domain we obtain consists then of the model parameters z and β for which such a problem has exactly one solution. Finally, we explore further the question of uniqueness of infinite-volume Gibbs point processes on R^d, in the unmarked setting. We present, in the context of repulsive interactions with a hard-core component, a novel approach to uniqueness by applying the discrete Dobrushin criterion to the continuum framework. We first fix a discretisation parameter a>0 and then study the behaviour of the uniqueness domain as a goes to 0. With this technique we are able to obtain explicit thresholds for the parameters z and β, which we then compare to existing results coming from the different methods of cluster expansion and disagreement percolation. Throughout this thesis, we illustrate our theoretical results with various examples both from classical statistical mechanics and stochastic geometry.},
  language  = {en}
}