Teaching involvement of our group

Members of our group are involved in the teaching of various courses at the University of Vienna. You can find more information on these teaching activities as well as links to some of the teaching material below.

Introduction to Cosmology (Bachelor 3rd year)

Our group is also teaching the 'Introduction to Cosmology' course, which is a mandatory course in the Vienna Astrophysics Bachelor curriculum (offered W2023, W2024). The course covers 

  • Expansion of the Universe
  • Friedmann equations and the energy content of the Universe
  • thermal history of the Universe and primordial nucleosynthesis
  • the cosmic microwave background
  • structure formation (from density fluctuations to the cosmic web and galaxies)
  • inflation and the problems of the 'old' big bang model

The lecture notes for this course are available in PDF format.

Methods of Computational Astrophysics (MSc Astrophysics & MSc Computational Science)

We are teaching two methods courses that are jointly available for Astrophysics and Computational Science MSc students. This is the course on the methods of computational astrophysics (offered S2025). The course covers

  • HPC, jit compilation and parallelization with numba, mpi4py, GPU programming with JAX and MLX
  • computing derivatives: sympy, finite difference approximations, autodiff
  • the discrete Fourier transform, convolutions, spectral derivatives
  • ordinary differential equations, methods for stiff problems, Hamiltonian systems
  • Monte-Carlo sampling and simulation, stochastic DEs
  • the diffusion/heat equation
  • the Poisson equation and gravity solvers
  • computational fluid dynamics

Lecture notes for this course will be available in PDF format in the future.
An accompanying github repository contains larger code examples.

Early Universe and Structure Formation

This is a MSc astrophysics-level course on more advanced topics in cosmology and structure formation. It covers similar topics to the BSc level course but in more depth and detail, and exercises are a more integral part of this course, making use of actual computational tools and working with data (offered S2025)

This is the link to the summer 2025 edition.

Cosmic Structures Course

Most closely related to the research in our group is the 'Cosmic Structures - Theory, Statistics & Numerics' course (offered W2022, S2024):

This is the link to the summer 2024 edition.

Cosmology and joint Cosmology-Astroparticle Physics Master/PhD Seminar

Our group is offering a 'current topics in cosmology' seminar every other semester, alternating with the cosmology-astroparticle physics seminar which is offered jointly by O. Hahn and J. Pradler. We encourage all students potentially interested in a Master thesis in the group to enroll. In the seminar, we will discuss together more recent topics in cosmology, astroparticle physics, and related fields beyond the content of the MSc lecture courses. The format is student-led presentations.

Other courses our group is involved in:

[Astrophysics] Data Science Lab for Astrophysics
[Astrophysics] Numerics Lab for Astrophysics
[Astrophysics] Hydrodynamics and Plasma Physics
[Mathematics] Introduction to Mathematical Programming
[Mathematics] Seminar Applied and Computational PDEs