Max Planck Institute for Mathematics

The Max Planck Institute for Mathematics mourns the death of Michael Atiyah, one of the giants of mathematics. Over many decades Michael Atiyah was a frequent and welcome visitor, inspiring speaker, ingeneous collaborator, and friend to many of the mathematicians in Bonn. Together with Friedrich Hirzebruch, MPIM's founding director and one of Michael's oldest and closest friends, he laid the foundations for topological K-theory, an important tool in algebraic topology. He almost always gave the opening lecture of the annual Mathematische Arbeitstagung in Bonn, from its beginning in 1957.

The Fields Medal is considered the Nobel Prize of mathematics, and this year the International Mathematical Union chose to award it to Peter Scholze. The professor at the University of Bonn’s Hausdorff Center for Mathematics and Director at the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics was presented with the award during the International Congress of Mathematicians in Rio de Janeiro. The 30-year-old is only the second German to ever receive this prize.

Peter Scholze is a new director at the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics. The 30-year old is one of the leading researchers in the field of Arithmetic Geometry. His achievements have already been recognized by a number of prizes and honors. Among others: a Clay Fellowship, the Prix Peccot of the Collège de France, the Clay Research Award, the Cole Prize for Algebra of the American Mathematical Society, the EMS Prize of the European Mathematical Society, the Leibniz Prize of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, and the membership in four prestigious scientific academies.

Geordie Williamson, who has been Advanced Researcher at MPIM from 2011-2016, is the youngest living scientists to become a member of the Royal Society.

Geordie Williamson works in Representation Theory. He has made several fundamental contributions to the field including his proof (with Ben Elias) of the Kazhdan-Lusztig positivity conjecture, his algebraic proof of the Jantzen conjectures, and his discovery of counter-examples to the generally suspected limits of the Lusztig conjecture in modular representation theory.