Josef Hofbauer proudly presents his

former graduate students

Johannes Fürlinger: Mitbetreuung seiner Dissertation q-Catalanzahlen bei Prof. Johann Cigler, die zu einer gemeinsamen Arbeit führte. Er arbeitete 18 Jahre bei der Wiener Städtischen Versicherung und ist jetzt selbständig.

Gabriela Kirlinger: My first own student, she wrote a masters thesis on Permanenz in Volterra-Lotka-Gleichungen: gekoppelte Räuber-Beute Systeme (1985), and a Ph.D. thesis on Permanence of some four-species Lotka-Volterra systems (1987). She is now Associate Professor at the Institut für Angewandte und Numerische Mathematik der TU Wien.

Erwin Amann: Nach seiner Diplomarbeit Permanenz in der Replikatorgleichung (1984) bei K. Sigmund und einer gemeinsamen Arbeit schrieb er eine Dissertation (1989) Permanence of catalytic networks. Nach vielen Jahren als Assistent und Dozent am Institut für Mikroöonomie der Universität Dortmund ist er jetzt C4-Professor in Essen. Seine Habilitationsschrift ist als Buch erschienen. Sein neuestes Buch ist Spieltheorie für Dummies.

Andrea Gaunersdorfer: After her master's thesis "Dynamik asymmetrischer Spiele" (Nov 89) under Karl Sigmund, which lead to a joint paper , she wrote her Ph.D. thesis Dynamics of asymmmetric games and heteroclinic cycles (Dez 91) under Sigmund's and my direction. After some time at the Vienna University of Economics and Business (WU Wien) she worked with Prof. Engelbert Dockner at the Department of Finance at the BWZ (Center for Business Studies) of the University Vienna. Seit Jänner 2001 ist sie Dozentin für Quantitative Betriebswirtschaftslehre. She is Associate Professor and Head of Department at the Department of Finance, at Oskar-Morgenstern-Platz.

Klaus Marschner: (Diplom, 1991) Attraktoren und Wellen in Reaktions-Diffusionsgleichungen. He works with IBM Österreich and is a Master of Blues and Swing.

Elisabeth Kollwentz: (Dipl.-Lehramt, Juni 1993) Populationsökologie: von ihren Anfängen im goldenen Zeitalter der theoretischen Ökologie bis zur Gegenwart.

Werner Brannath wrote a fine master's thesis (Diplom Okt. 93) Unstable Heteroclinic Cycles in Heteroclinic Networks on the Simplex which was published in Nonlinearity 7 (5), 1367-1384 (1994). He then did his Ph.D. thesis On fundamental theorems in mathematical finance with Walter Schachermayer . From 1998 he worked at the Institut für Medizinische Statistik der Uni Wien (now Medical University Vienna), Habilitation 2005. Since August 2010 he is Professor for Applied Statistics and Biometry at the University of Bremen and Head of the Competence Centre of Clinical Trials Bremen, Biometry Section.

Manfred Plank wrote both his masters' thesis Hamiltonische Systeme und Lotka-Volterra Gleichungen (Jan 1994) and his Ph.D. thesis Conservative Properties of Dynamical Systems arising in Evolutionary Game Theory (June 1997) under my direction. After a two year post-doc economics education at the IHS , and despite his publications, he unfortunately did not get a reasonable job at a university. So he joined the Austrian National Bank . Since 2000 he works at the UBS (Union Banque de Suisse) in Zürich where he was Executive Director of the Credit and Country Risk Measurement Group. In August 2009 he moved to Credit Suisse where he is a Managing Director and head of Credit Analytics. Since 2013 he is back to UBS as Managing Director and head of Risk Control Large Corporates, Commodity Trade Finance & Aircraft Financing.

Ulrich Berger: did both his masters thesis Replikator- und Best Response Dynamik für 3x3 Bimatrixspiele (Diplom 1995), and his Ph.D. thesis Best response dynamics and Nash dynamics for games (Dissertation 1998) under my direction. He got a second Ph.D. in Economics, and is now the head of the Department of Analytical Economics at the Vienna University of Economics and Business Administration (WU Wien). In his free time he enjoys to debunk pseudo science.

Christoph Ableitinger wrote a master's thesis on Evolutionary Game Dynamics (April 2004). He then did a Ph.D. at the Faculty of Mathematics in Vienna. After several years at the University of Essen he is now back in Vienna and got his Habilitation (Didactics of Mathematics) in 2014.

Martin Hahn wrote a master's thesis on Survival of dominated strategies under the best response dynamics (May 2004) and a Ph.D. thesis on Shapley polygons at UCL (Oct 2009). He worked for some years at the Fachhochschule Wr. Neustadt. Since 2012 he is at the Finanzmarktaufsicht (Austrian Financial Market Authority) where he is not responsible for banks but for insurance companies.

Thomas A. Gobold (Lehramt Mathematik und Chemie) schrieb eine Diplomarbeit Komplexe Zahlen und der Integralsatz von Cauchy (Dez 2006). He teaches Mathematics and Chemistry at the Haydnrealgymnasium in Vienna.

Maximilian Stejskal wrote a master's thesis on Games between Two Populations with Selfinteraction under Best Response Dynamics (Nov 2008).

Sebastian Rieder wrote a master's thesis on Evolutionary Games and Imitation dynamics (Nov 2009).

Mahdi Rahimi wrote a master's thesis on Innovative dynamics in bimatrix games (Dec 2009).

Sebastian Novak wrote a master's thesis on Spatially structured games (July 2010). In particular he solved an old problem of S. Karlin, see his paper in TPB The number of equilibria in the diallelic Levene model with multiple demes. He did his Ph.D. at IST Austria in Nick Barton’s group in 2016. He now works as Business Consultant.

Peter Bednarik wrote a master's thesis on Discretized Best-Response Dynamics for Cyclic Games (July 2011). He did his Ph.D. in Göttingen. After postdoc positions at IIASA and with Tyran, he now works with Ulrich Berger at the WU, see here.

Emmanuelle Deschamps: Dynamic of the Nash Map for the Rock Scissors Paper game (master thesis at University Pierre et Marie Curie, Oct 2012).

Zhang Boyu wrote a Ph.D. thesis on Evolutionary games and equilibrium selection (Oct 2012). He is now associate professor at Beijing Normal University, see here.

Maria Summer wrote a master's thesis on Geburts- und Todesprozesse in stetiger Zeit (April 2013).

Johannes Mathä wrote a master's thesis on Dynamics for games with continuous strategy sets (April 2013).

Karoline Schindler wrote a master's thesis on The competitive Lotka-Volterra system (April 2013).

Benjamin Schelling wrote a master's thesis on On the Gause predator prey model with a refuge (April 2015).

Jun Honda wrote a Ph.D. thesis Essays on markets with search frictions and bandwagon effect (Juni 2015) under joint supervision of Maarten Janssen, Karl Schlag and myself. He is now postdoc in Frankfurt

Martin Pontz wrote a master's thesis on The two-locus two-allele model in the weak selection limit (Dec 2015). He did a Ph.D. with Reinhard Bürger at the Vienna graduate school for population genetics (2021). Now he is a postdoc at Tel Aviv University.

Ankica Džijan Markovic wrote a master's thesis on Matrix stability concepts for the Lotka-Volterra model (Jan 2017).

Philipp Merz wrote a master's thesis on Quasi-stationary distributions in Moran models for two strategy games (August 2018).

Birgit Haider wrote a master's thesis on The Brown--von Neumann--Nash dynamics for role games (Dec 2018).

Julia Schindler wrote a master's thesis on The adaptive dynamics method and its applications (June 2019).

Simone Altmann wrote a master's thesis on Mathematical Models in Epidemiology and the Spread of Covid-19 (Nov 2020).

Jelena Petrović wrote a master's thesis on Mathematical Modeling and Analysis of the Control Reproduction Number of the COVID-19 Pandemic in Austria and Germany (April 2021).

Lukas Baumgartner wrote a master's thesis on On the index of saturated equilibria (May 2022). He is now a doctoral student with Peter Szmolyan

Franziska Szinovatz wrote a master's thesis on The Neimark Sacker bifurcation (July 2023).


I was external examiner for the following Ph.D.s

Maria de Lourdes Correia Fernandes Repulsivity with applications to persistence and to the existence of solution for boundary value problems (1989, Lisboa)

David Leslie: Reinforcement learning in games (Bristol 2003).

Arndt von Schemde: A geometric-combinatorial approach to index and stability in bimatrix games (London School of Economics, 2004) (His thesis is available as a book !)

Ping Yan: Limit Cycles for Generalized Lienard-type and Lotka--Volterra Systems (Turku, 2005)

Yannick Viossat: Correlated equilibria, evolutionary games and population dynamics (Ecole Polytechnique Paris, 2005)

Gunter Neumann: Toxin Mediated Interactions in View of the Rock Scissors Paper Game (Jena 2007)

Ziv Gorodeisky: Stochastic Perturbations of Discontinuous Dynamics with Applications to Game Theory (Jerusalem 2009)

Anne V. Balthasar: Geometry and equilibria in bimatrix games (London School of Economics, 2009)

Marius I. Ochea: Essays on nonlinear evolutionary game dynamics (Amsterdam 2010)

Belgin Seymenoglu: Invariant Manifolds of Models from Population Genetics  (UCL 2018). Belgin also wrote a beautiful article about Christopher Zeeman.