In 1995, the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG), the largest public research funding organization in Germany, decided to launch a priority program (Schw- punktprogramm in German) calledKondisk- Dynamics and Control of Systems with Mixed Continuous and Discrete Dynamics. Such a priority program is usually sponsored for six years and supports about twenty scientists at a time, in engineering andcomputersciencemostlyyoungresearchersworkingforadoctoraldegree. There is a yearly competition across all disciplines of arts and sciences for the funding of such programs, and the group of proposers...