Short Biographies






Martin Andler

Martin Andler teaches mathematics at the University of Versailles Saint-Quentin; he has held visiting positions at MIT and Rutgers University. His research focuses on two main areas: representation theory of Lie groups, and the history of 20th century mathematics. He is the chairman of Animath, a French organisation promoting mathematics for kids.

Kai-Uwe Bux

Kai-Uwe Bux is a professor of mathematics at University of Bielefeld, Germany. He obtained his PhD from Goethe University Frankfurt in 1998. Kai-Uwe is engaged in topology, geometry, and algebra, with a focus on geometric group theory. Among others, he studies arithmetic groups, groups of (outer) automorphisms of free groups or mapping class groups of surfaces, Thompson's groups, and many others.

John H. Conway

John H. Conway is one of the most prolific mathematicians, currently a professor at Princeton University, John von Neumann Distinguished Professor emeritus, and Gorenstein Distinguished Professor at Queens College, New York. He is probably best known for the "Game of Life" that he invented, but there are many areas of his work that he likes much better, for instance "combinatorial game theory" (that was developed in partial collaboration with Elwyn Berlekam and Richard Guy): a very natural and simple definition that leads to a class of games with incredibly rich structure, including the now-famous "surreal numbers." He has made substantial contributions to many other areas of mathematics, such as Group Theory, Knot Theory, Number Theory, and Combinatorial Game Theory; his Erdőos number equals one. John Conway greatly enjoys spending time with students. In 2015, on graduation day, he received an Honorary Doctorate from Jacobs University.

Gábor Domokos

Gábor Domokos is a professor at Budapest University of Technology and Economics and an adjunct professor at Cornell University. He obtained his PhD in 1989, and habilitation in 1997, both from the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. Later in 2004 he became the youngest member of the Academy. His main field of research lies in the intersection of applied mathematics and engineering. Domokos is famous for solving Vladimir Arnold's conjecture, namely, by finding a convex body, which is now called gömböc (from hungarian "gömb"—sphere), that has exactly two equilibrium points, one is stable and the other is unstable. Existance of such a body was conjectured by Arnold in 1995.

Mikhail Hlushchanka

TBA

Theodore (Ted) P. Hill

Theodore (Ted) P. Hill is a Professor Emeritus at Georgia Institute of Technology. He got his PhD from the University of California at Berkeley in 1977. Ted is known for his research on mathematical probability theory, in particular for his work on Benford's law and the theories of optimal stopping and fair division. For example, in his recognized work on Benford's law Hill gave a mathematical explanation of the striking empirical fact (which was first observed by physicist Frank Benford in 1938) that the first significant digit in many naturally occurring collections of numbers is likely to be small.

Marc-Thorsten Hütt

Marc-Thorsten Hütt is Professor of Computational Systems Biology at Jacobs University Bremen. He does a cutting-edge research on correlations in biological systems on very different scales, ranging from genomes to interacting cells. Why do biological systems tend to self-organization, as, for example, in dense human crows, swamps of fish, and even during DNA formation? Hütt and his research group at Jacobs make successful attacks on these challenging real-life questions using tools provided by the methods from nonlinear dynamics and information theory.

Ivan Izmestiev

Ivan Izmestiev obtained his docatorate in 2001 from Lomonosov Moscow State University with the thesis about toric actions on manifolds. Now he is an assistant professor at the University of Fribourg, Switzerland. By his own confession, he is "interested in beautiful mathematical ideas and problems in any domain, with a focus on geometry, topology, and combinatorics". Apart from theoretical results on various questions in geometry, Izmestiev worked on some problems in discrete differential geometry and rigidity.

Victor Kleptsyn

Victor Kleptsyn is a researcher at CNRS, in the Institute of Mathematical Research of Rennes. His working themes are mainly Dynamical Systems and Geometry. His belief is that most arguments, theorems, and proofs in the mathematics should be visual, and easily explicable, at least on the "why should it be true" level of explanation.

Anke Pohl

Anke Pohl received her PhD from the University of Paderborn in 2009, and obtained a habilitation in 2016 in Göttingen. In 2016 she was appointed as a Professor of Mathematics at the University of Jena, Germany. Her wide research interests include, among others, such topics as quantum chaos, dynamical systems, ergodic theory, analytic number theory, and analysis. With her thesis she made a substantial contribution to understanding of the interplay between dynamics (symbolic dynamics and geodesic flows) and geometry (the theory of orbifolds)—something that can be easily comprehended, for example, by observing how billiard balls move around the table.

Dierk Schleicher

Dierk Schleicher is professor of mathematics at Jacobs University Bremen. He obtained his PhD at Cornell University, NY, and held visiting positions in Berkeley, Stony Brook, Paris, Toronto, and München. His main research interests are in Dynamical Systems and Chaos, especially in Holomorphic Dynamics and the Mandelbrot set, and the dynamics of Newton's root-finding method. He was one of the main organizers of the 50th International Mathematical Olympiad (IMO) 2009 in Bremen.

Bernd Sturmfels

Bernd Sturmfels received doctoral degrees in Mathematics in 1987 from the University of Washington, Seattle, USA, and the Technical University Darmstadt, Germany. He joined University of California at Berkeley in 1995, where he is Professor of Mathematics, Statistics and Computer Science. Since 2017 he is a director at the Max-Planck Institute for Mathematics, Leipzig. Among his numerous honors Sloan Fellowship and a Clay Senior Scholarship. He served as a Vice President of the American Mathematical Society, and he was awarded an honorary doctorate from Goethe University Frankfurt in 2015. A leading experimentalist among mathematicians, Sturmfels has authored ten books and 240 research articles, in the areas of combinatorics, algebraic geometry, symbolic computation and their applications. He is also known for his works in computational biology, where he studied mathematical models of genes' evolution.

Yuri B. Suris

Yuri B. Suris is a professor of mathematics at Technische Universität Berlin. He works at the cross-road of discrete differential geometry and integrable dynamical systems. His most cited book "Discrete Differential Geometry" (written together with Alexander Bobenko from TU Berlin) sums up recent developments on two nicely related subjects: discrete differential geometry, where classical notions like special surfaces in the Euclidean or projective 3-space are replaced by discrete versions, and discrete integrable systems, where completely integrable PDEs, like those coming from mechanics, are discretized in a way which preserves their "integrable" character.

Sergei Tabachnikov

Sergei Tabachnikov is a professor of mathematics at Penn State University and is the Director of the MASS (Mathematics Advanced Study Semesters) program at Penn State. His research interests include Geometry, Topology, and Dynamical Systems; one of his favorite topics is mathematical billiards. In 2013-2015, he is serving as the Deputy Director of ICERM (Institute for Computational and Experimental Mathematics) at Brown University. He (co)authored several books, including Mathematical Omnibus, a collection of 30 lectures on classical mathematics. In 1988-1990, Sergei headed the mathematical section of Kvant (Quantum) magazine, a Russian monthly on physics and mathematics for high school and college students.

Rebecca Waldecker

Rebecca Waldecker is a professor at the Institute of Mathematics of the Marthin-Luther-Universität-Halle-Wittenberg, Germany. She is a specialist of Group theory, more specifically, she is interested in finite groups. In her research projects, she works with methods from abstract group theory, but also with help from the Classification of Finite Simple Groups. Rebecca Waldecker is a referee for Archiv der Mathematik, for the Journal of Algebra, the Journal of Group Theory, the Münster Journal of Mathematics and the Journal of Pure and Applied Algebra. In addition, she actively participates in outreach activities like the "Girls' Day" to attract new students (particularly female students), the "Long Night of Science" for a public audience, and master classes for school students.

Don Zagier

Don Zagier is an American mathematician whose main area of work is Number Theory. In 1976, aged only 24, he became Germany's youngest professor. Among other things, he is known for discovering a short elementary proof of Fermat's theorem on sum of two squares: it consists of a single sentence. He is currently one of the directors of the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in Bonn, Germany, and also holds a joint position with the ICTP Trieste, Italy.

Günter M. Ziegler

Günter M. Ziegler is a professor at the Freie Universität, Berlin. His interests are in connection of Discrete and Computational Geometry (especially polytopes), algebraic and topological methods in Combinatorics, Discrete Mathematics and the theory of Linear and Integer Programming. He received numerous prizes, among them the 2001 Leibniz Prize for his research and the Communicator Award in 2008, when he was a co-organizer of the "Year of Mathematics" in Germany. His writing includes Proofs from THE BOOK, which has been published in 14 different languages by now.

Anton Zorich

Anton Zorich is a professor at the Institut de Mathématiques de Jussieu - Paris Rive Gauche. He has been a guest professor at IHES and the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in Bonn. Zorich made a deep contribution to the theory of closed geodesics on flat surfaces - the topic important for studing various dynamical system, including celestial mechanics. In 2006, he was an invited speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians, where he presented his results about geodesics on flat surfaces. Anton Zorich's range of interests include dynamical systems, geometric and algebraic topology, combinatorics.