ERC FUNDED PROJECTS

From medieval times, Arabic as well as European music was analysed in terms that were inherited from Classical Antiquity and had thus developed in a very different music culture. In spite of recent breakthroughs in the understanding of the latter, whose technicalities we access not only through texts and iconography, but also through instrument finds and surviving notated melodies, its relation to music traditions known from later periods and different places is almost uncharted territory. The present project explores relations between Hellenic/Hellenistic music as pervaded the theatres and concert halls throughout and beyond the Roman empire, Near Eastern traditions – from the diatonic system emerging from cuneiform sources to the flourishing musical world of the caliphates – and, as far as possible, African musical life south of Egypt as well – a region that maintained close ties both with the Hellenised culture of its northern neighbours and with the Arabian Peninsula. On the one hand, this demands collaboration between Classical Philology and Arabic Studies, extending methods recently developed within music archaeological research related to the Classical Mediterranean. Arabic writings need to be examined in close reading, using recent insights into the interplay between ancient music theory and practice, in order to segregate the influence of Greek thinking from ideas and facts that must relate to contemporaneous ‘Arabic’ music-making. In this way we hope better to define the relation of this tradition to the ‘Classical world’, potentially breaking free of Orientalising bias informing modern views. On the other hand, the study and reconstruction, virtual and material, of wind instruments of Hellenistic pedigree but found outside the confinements of the Hellenistic ‘heartlands’ may provide evidence of ‘foreign’ tonality employed in those regions – specifically the royal city of Meroë in modern Sudan and the Oxus Temple in modern Tajikistan.

775 959 €

Start date: 2018-09-01, End date: 2023-08-31

The main focus of this project is the mathematical analysis of many-body quantum systems, in particular, interacting quantum gases at low temperature. The recent experimental advances in studying ultra-cold atomic gases have led to renewed interest in these systems. They display a rich variety of quantum phenomena, including, e.g., Bose–Einstein condensation and superfluidity, which makes them interesting both from a physical and a mathematical point of view. The goal of this project is the development of new mathematical tools for dealing with complex problems in many-body quantum systems. New mathematical methods lead to different points of view and thus increase our understanding of physical systems. From the point of view of mathematical physics, there has been significant progress in the last few years in understanding the interesting phenomena occurring in quantum gases, and the goal of this project is to investigate some of the key issues that remain unsolved. Due to the complex nature of the problems, new mathematical ideas and methods will have to be developed for this purpose. One of the main question addressed in this proposal is the validity of the Bogoliubov approximation for the excitation spectrum of many-body quantum systems. While its accuracy has been successfully shown for the ground state energy of various models, its predictions concerning the excitation spectrum have so far only been verified in the Hartree limit, an extreme form of a mean-field limit where the interaction among the particles is very weak and ranges over the whole system. The central part of this project is concerned with the extension of these results to the case of short-range interactions. Apart from being mathematically much more challenging, the short-range case is the one most relevant for the description of actual physical systems. Hence progress along these lines can be expected to yield valuable insight into the complex behavior of these many-body quantum systems.

1 497 755 €

Start date: 2016-10-01, End date: 2021-09-30

The project will examine the histories of yoga, ayurveda and rasashastra (Indian alchemy and iatrochemistry) from the tenth century to the present, focussing on the disciplines' health, rejuvenation and longevity practices. The goals of the project are to reveal the entanglements of these historical traditions, and to trace the trajectories of their evolution as components of today's global healthcare and personal development industries. Our hypothesis is that practices aimed at achieving health, rejuvenation and longevity constitute a key area of exchange between the three disciplines, preparing the grounds for a series of important pharmaceutical and technological innovations and also profoundly influencing the discourses of today's medicalized forms of globalized yoga as well as of contemporary institutionalized forms of ayurveda and rasashastra. Drawing upon the primary historical sources of each respective tradition as well as on fieldwork data, the research team will explore the shared terminology, praxis and theory of these three disciplines. We will examine why, when and how health, rejuvenation and longevity practices were employed; how each discipline’s discourse and practical applications relates to those of the others; and how past encounters and cross-fertilizations impact on contemporary health-related practices in yogic, ayurvedic and alchemists’ milieus. The five-year project will be based at the Department of South Asian, Tibetan and Buddhist Studies at Vienna University and carried out by an international team of 3 post-doctoral researchers. The research will be grounded in the fields of South Asian studies and social history. An international workshop and an international conference will be organized to present and discuss the research results, which will also be published in peer-reviewed journals, an edited volume, and in individual monographs. A project website will provide open access to all research results.

1 416 146 €

Start date: 2015-06-01, End date: 2020-05-31

Computational simulations of natural phenomena are essential in science, engineering, product design, architecture, and computer graphics applications. However, despite progress in numerical algorithms and computational power, it is still unfeasible to compute detailed simulations at large scales. To make matters worse, important phenomena like turbulent splashing liquids and fracturing solids rely on delicate coupling between small-scale details and large-scale behavior. Brute-force computation of such phenomena is intractable, and current adaptive techniques are too fragile, too costly, or too crude to capture subtle instabilities at small scales. Increases in computational power and parallel algorithms will improve the situation, but progress will only be incremental until we address the problem at its source. I propose two main approaches to this problem of efficiently simulating large-scale liquid and solid dynamics. My first avenue of research combines numerics and shape: I will investigate a careful de-coupling of dynamics from geometry, allowing essential shape details to be preserved and retrieved without wasting computation. I will also develop methods for merging small-scale analytical solutions with large-scale numerical algorithms. (These ideas show particular promise for phenomena like splashing liquids and fracturing solids, whose small-scale behaviors are poorly captured by standard finite element methods.) My second main research direction is the manipulation of large-scale simulation data: Given the redundant and parallel nature of physics computation, we will drastically speed up computation with novel dimension reduction and data compression approaches. We can also minimize unnecessary computation by re-using existing simulation data. The novel approaches resulting from this work will undoubtedly synergize to enable the simulation and understanding of complicated natural and biological processes that are presently unfeasible to compute.

1 500 000 €

Start date: 2015-03-01, End date: 2020-02-29