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Carlo Pagano of Concordia University, currently a visitor at Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in Bonn, has received the 2025 André Aisenstadt Prize. This celebrates the achievements of young Canadians in both pure and applied mathematics. 

In joint work with Peter Koymans, he settled Stevenhagen's conjecture on the negative Pell equation, which is a very strong result in arithmetic statistics. Their breakthrough was covered extensively in the Quanta magazine and can be found here.

But Peter and Carlo have not stopped there. They switched gears and are now tackling problems concerning decidability, in particular related to the (non-)existence of an algorithm that determines, under certain assumptions, whether a Diophantine equation has a solution. You can read more about this in another Quanta magazine article about their work.

Carlo’s strong ties to MPIM include his two year postdoctoral stay, followed by multiple subsequent visits.  

Doug Ulmer, currently a visitor at the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in Bonn, was selected as member of the new class of 2025 fellows of the American Mathematical Society. The new group of fellows includes also the former MPIM guests Wiesława Nizioł and Florian Herzig. The prestigious Fellows of the AMS program recognizes members who have made outstanding contributions to the creation, exposition, advancement, communication, and utilization of mathematics.

SCAM E-MAILS GOING AROUND FROM VARIOUS E-MAIL ADDRESSES

It has come to our attention that some people have been contacted by various e-mail addresses about their stay during MPIM conferences (even if they are not planning to attend any conferences). Please be aware that this is a scam!

Here are some of the addresses we know have sent scam e-mails:
operations@gtravelservice.com
reservations@gtravelexpert.com
bookings@g-travelexperts.com
dse_NA4@docusign.net
support@g-travelexperts.com
rooms@g-travelexperts.com
booking@gtravelmanagement.com
housing@conferencesmanagement.org
Accommodations@conferencecare.org

Please DO NOT give out any personal information to these or other companies. Please ignore any emails and calls from them or any other travel agent.

MPIM is not affiliated in any way with this or any other travel agent. We will only ever contact you via official MPIM-e-mail-addresses that end in "@mpim-bonn.mpg.de".

We take data privacy and security with the utmost importance and your contact information is not forwarded to a third party. The agencies DO NOT have access to your information through us.
They are accessing public information and searching contact details through search engines like Google.

If you receive a phone call or an email from them or have been contacted by any other travel agent, please forward the information immediately to us. Your kind understanding and support is much appreciated.

What to do if you have been contacted by a scam company about booking hotels?

1. If you have given out your credit card information to an external company or anyone who called you about booking hotel rooms for the conference, call your credit card company immediately, alert them to the
scam, and deny the charge.

2. Change your online passwords and PINs to prevent fraudsters from doing any further damage.

3. Continue to monitor your credit card to look for fraudulent charges. Request further information from your credit card company regarding closing your account or issuing a new card.

Artificial intelligence and computer science are driving developments in many areas of society – including in scientific research. This has prompted the Max Planck Society and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation to honour outstanding achievements in the use of algorithms in mathematics, microscopy and climate research in 2024: The Max Planck-Humboldt Research Award, endowed with 1.5 million euros, goes to Geordie Williamson, who was Advanced Researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics from 2011-2016, and is now Professor at the University of Sydney. Williamson uses artificial intelligence (AI) for his fundamental work in mathematics.

Scientists today use artificial intelligence in many areas, especially in the natural sciences, for tasks such as analysing data or images. In theoretical mathematics, on the other hand, AI has barely been used thus far. Now Geordie Williamson is aiming to change that. In his previous work he has already used artificial neural networks, which can guide mathematical intuition by drawing attention to previously unrecognised relationships in a large number of mathematical objects. Artificial intelligence can also help to generate examples or counterexamples that prove or disprove mathematical assumptions. Although artificial neural networks can recognise patterns in large data sets very efficiently and effectively, they know nothing about mathematics. It therefore remains the task of mathematicians to filter out the sensible proposals from AI, to interpret them and, in the case of new assumptions about mathematical relationships, to prove or disprove them. Geordie Williamson wants to optimise the possibilities of using AI in theoretical mathematics in the collaboration made possible by the Max Planck-Humboldt Research Award. To this end, he will work closely with researchers from the University of Bonn and the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in Bonn, where he will also spend two periods of several months each.

Connecting the countable with geometry

Geordie Williamson's previous research work was characterised, among other things, by the fact that he brought together different fields such as combinatorics and geometry. In simple terms, combinatorics can be understood as the branch of mathematics that is dedicated to everything that can be counted; it includes subjects such as graph theory and discrete mathematics. Geometry is about objects in spaces, i.e. straight lines, surfaces, and solids, just like in school maths. Both sub-areas come together in a simple example when the intersection points of a curve and a surface are to be counted. Geordie Williamson has now opened up ways of solving combinatorics problems with geometric tools, for which purpose he first had to develop a kind of common mathematical language for the two fields so that combinatorial problems could be worked on in geometry, but geometry could also be translated into combinatorics. With this approach, Geordie Williamson has proved or disproved various assumptions that mathematicians have been working on intensively, but to no avail, for a long time.

For example, Williamson in collaboration with Ben Elias from the University of Oregon provided a general proof of an important conjecture in mathematics relating to Kazhdan-Lusztig polynomials. The work of David Kazhdan and George Lusztig provided precise recipes for building up certain mathematical objects out of constituent pieces. Imagine a recipe that contains a list of ingredients and instructions on what to do with them, but the recipe does not specify the quantities. Kazhdan and Lusztig hypothesised that there are polynomials in mathematics for such cases, from which the quantities for the recipe can be determined. Polynomials are formulae that are familiar to us in their simple form from the binomial formulae we study in school. Geordie Williamson has proven this assumption, for which evidence had previously been sought in vain for a long time. His methods, borrowed from geometry, also make it much easier to solve the polynomials that provide the unknown data and to analyse them in greater depth.

Solving knot theory problems with the help of AI

As part of the collaboration with researchers from the University of Bonn and the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics, all possible as a result of the award, Williamson will tackle various mathematical problems with the help of artificial intelligence. Amongst the problems that they will tackle is a problem in knot theory. In simple terms, this can be explained by the fact that it is often impossible to recognise whether knotted structures, such as in a string, are actually knotted. What this means is: does the knot remain intact when you pull on the ends of the cord or does it unravel? One aim of the project is to identify these cases in a simple way so that these uninteresting cases can be quickly filtered out and the researchers can focus on the real knots. AI is set to provide support here and assistance in gaining new mathematical insights. Geordie Williamson studied at the University of Sydney and received his doctorate from the University of Freiburg in 2008. He then conducted research at Oxford University until 2011 and headed a research group at the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics until 2016. After other shorter stints at the Hausdorff Centre for Mathematics in Bonn and at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton he was appointed Professor at the University of Sydney in 2017. He serves as the founding Director of the Sydney Mathematical Research Institute. Geordie Williamson is a Fellow of the British Royal Society and the Australian Academy of Science.

About the award

The Max Planck Society and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation present the Max Planck-Humboldt Research Award, along with 1.5 million euros in prize money, to a researcher from abroad. 80,000 euros in personal prize money is also awarded. The focus here is on personalities whose work is characterised by outstanding potential for the future. The prize is intended to attract particularly innovative scientists working abroad to spend a fixed period of time at a German higher education institution or research facility. The Federal Ministry of Education and Research provides the funding for the award. The focus of the award alternates each year between natural and engineering sciences, life sciences, humanities and social sciences.

Proposed by Robert Langlands in the 1960s, the eponymous program is one of the largest projects in modern mathematic and it consists of different branches. Over the years, the MPIM has gained a reputation as one of the hubs for the Langlands program. We are proud that MPIM Director Dennis Gaitsgory led a nine-person team of mathematicians that settles the geometric Langlands conjecture. The proof is the culmination of a research program that spanned three decades. You can read the full story in a recent article in Quantamagazine.

Link to the Quantamagazine article

Ana Caraiani, who holds the Hausdorff Chair at the University of Bonn, is newly appointed Max Planck Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics. The Max Planck Fellowship is a prestigeous honor bestowed on outstanding university professors by the Max Planck Society for a limited term of 5 years. The fellows receive funds to build up a small research group at the host institute. The goal is to promote cooperation between university faculty and Max Planck Society researchers.

Ana Caraiani works at the interface between the Langlands program and arithmetic geometry. In recent years, she has co-authored many of her papers with Peter Scholze who is very happy about his new colleague in Bonn: "With Ana Caraiani, a world-leading scientist in arithmetic geometry comes to Bonn. We have already worked together a lot in the past, on questions in the Langlands program and especially on the cohomology of Shimura varieties. I'm very much looking forward to continuing this work, and especially to organizing seminars and other events together," says Peter Scholze.

Ana Caraiani was born in Bucharest in 1985. She won a silver medal and two gold medals for the Rumanian Team in the International Math Olympiad. After graduating high school in 2003, she studied at Princeton University, where she graduated summa cum laude in 2007, with an undergraduate thesis on Galois representations supervised by Andrew Wiles. She did her graduate studies at Harvard University under the supervision of Wiles' student Richard Taylor, earning her Ph.D. in 2012 with a dissertation concerning local-global compatibility in the Langlands correspondence. After spending a year at the University of Chicago, she returned to Princeton and the Institute for Advanced Study as a postdoc. In 2016, she moved to the Hausdorff Center for Mathematics as a Bonn Junior Fellow. She moved to Imperial College London in 2017 as a Royal Society University Research Fellow and Senior Lecturer. In 2019, she became a Royal Society University Research Fellow and Reader at Imperial College London. In 2021, Caraiani became a full professor at Imperial College London before moving to her position as Hausdorff Chair in Bonn in the fall of 2022. In 2018, she was one of the winners of the Whitehead Prize of the London Mathematical Society. In 2020, she was elected as a Fellow of the American Mathematical Society and was one of the 2020 winners of the EMS Prize. Recently, she was awarded one of the New Horizon Prizes in Mathematics of 2023.

A recent interview with Ana Caraiani can be found in Quantamagazine.

Photo credit: Barbara Frommann/Uni Bonn; HCM

Tobias Barthel, advanced researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics, has received a prestigeous ERC starting grant for his project on the "spectral geometry of higher categories". The total budget of the grant is 1.5 million euros for the project duration of 5 years. The eleven Max Planck grantees are among the 397 young researchers who received an ERC Starting Grant in 2021.

The European Research Council (ERC) is the premier European funding organisation for excellent frontier research. It funds creative researchers of any nationality and age, to run projects based across Europe. The ERC offers four core grant schemes: Starting Grants, Consolidator Grants, Advanced Grants and Synergy Grants. The ERC is led by an independent governing body, the Scientific Council. Its prestigeous grants are awarded anually.

Link to the official announcement of the ERC starting grants results.