The Department of Applied Mathematics was established on April 1, 1992 as the 10-th department of the Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science of the VSB-Technical University of Ostrava. Even thought the main goal was to provide mathematical courses necessary for the study of engineering branches, from the very beginning we also aimed at teaching courses from different fields of modern applied mathematics which were particularly devoted to Ph.D. students throughout the university. Further, we have built up a research programme in the field of applied mathematics that has also become a base for the research and education of high qualified specialists in engineering. Moreover, we have created a new study field in order to educate high qualified experts in applied mathematics for the local industry and the related research.
To fulfill these goals the staff of the department has to regularly increase its qualification. From the beginning (2 assistant professors in 1992) we succeeded in improving the qualification structure of the staff so that nowadays there are three professors, who were by chance all habilitated at the Faculty of Mathematics and Physics of the Charles University in Prague, two of them being D.Sc., further, three associated professors and seven young assistant professors with the Ph.D. degrees.
Building up our course started with the specialization Applied Mathematics which was inscribed mainly by some excellent students of the Computer Science course with a special interest in mathematics. A milestone in the further development was an accreditation of the Ph.D. study course Computer Science and Applied Mathematics. A close relation to the computer science helped a lot in an efficient coding of the results of numbers of our projects. Leading related institutes abroad are interesting in our students as well as alumnus which gives them more knowledge and experience. Nowadays we provide the course Computational Mathematics within the course Information Technology in the bachelor, master as well as doctoral study degree.
The department has gradually made contacts to leading institutes in the field of applied mathematics such as Johannes Kepler University Linz, University of Colorado, Aalborg University, Graz University of Technology, City University New York, University of Bologna, University of Campinas, etc. Within cooperations on common projects we produced papers published in top international journals. Except for the research within the faculty there is also a remarkable cooperation within the university which is now mostly with the Institute of Physics on shape optimization in magnetostatics, with the Department of Mechanics on contact problems and contact shape optimization, with the Department of Nonferrous Metals, with the Department of Analytical Chemistry, etc.