A photo taken with the jury: From left to right: Werner, Wolfram, Merlin, Mama and Dorothee

On Thursday February 22, 2018 at the Institute of Mathematics of the University of Kassel in Germany, took place the defense of the PhD thesis of Merlin Mouafo Wouodjie, who happens to be the first AIMS Cameroon alumnus to complete a PhD thesis. The jury was composed of Professors Wolfram Koepf, Werner Seiler, Dorothee Knees of the University of Kassel, Prof. Mark van Hoeij from the Florida State University in US and Prof. Mama Foupouagnigni from AIMS Cameroon and the University of Yaounde I in Cameroon.

Merlin graduated from AIMS Cameroon with the first batch in July 2014 with a Distinction that allowed him to be retained as tutor the next academic year in the same centre.

Merlin, due to his outstanding academic results, obtained a DAAD scholarship which enabled him to carry on research for his PhD thesis in Mathematics at the University of Kassel from December 2015, under the co-supervision of Professor Wolfram Koepf of the University of Kassel and Professor Mama Foupouagnigni, Centre President of AIMS Cameroon and Professor of Mathematics at the University of Yaounde I.

Dr. Wouodjie in his PhD thesis entitled “On the solutions of holonomic third-order linear irreducible differential equations in terms of hypergeometric functions” found and implemented in the computer algebra system Maple, a very efficient algorithm finding solutions to any third-order homogeneous linear irreducible differential equations with rational coefficients. This result is new, relevant and fills a big gap in the literature since up now, such algorithm was not available. It also has various applications taking into account very important role played by differential equations in modelling real life problems.

For having obtained very good results during his PhD in a very short term – 2 years— Merlin got an Assistant Position at the Mathematics Institute of the University of Kassel.