Public

The Max Planck Institute will hold a memorial event for Yuri Ivanovich Manin this Friday, January 13, from 16:00 - 17:30h in the lecture hall. The mathematical community and friends are welcome to attend in person or online:

https://zoom.us/j/94545109502?pwd=Qk9jZW1aTGI0dWZWMmRRQ1VmVndlZz09

Meeting ID: 945 4510 9502
Passcode: 172435

Joseph Najnudel, mathematician and accomplished pianist, will give a public piano recital on June 13th, beginning at 17:30h in the MPIM lecture hall. Everybody and their families are cordially invited. The concert is free of charge.

Joseph Najnudel is a researcher (University of Cincinnati and Université de Toulouse) working in random matrices and stochastic analysis. He is also a pianist and occasionnally composes music for piano. He attended the Conservatoire de Paris (CNSM, 1997-2007) where he obtained a diploma in piano and in musical writing. For the public concert at MPI he will pay homage to Beethoven by playing the Moonlight sonata in C sharp minor, op. 27 no.2, the Appassionnata sonata in F minor, op. 57, as well as some of his own compositions.

Coarse geometry can lead to useful classifications. For example, the word metric on a finitely presented group recognises (up to finite groups) if that group is the fundamental group of a 3-manifold and it carries a lot of information about the manifold. I will mainly talk about coarse geometry for complex surfaces, showing that bilipschitz geometry, which is purely topological and ignores any analytic structure, can recover the local analytic structure up to Zariski equisingularity. (Joint work with Anne Pichon).

In 1956, the Dutch graphic artist M.C. Escher made an unusual lithograph with the title `Print Gallery‘. It shows a young man viewing a print in an exhibition gallery. Amongst the buildings depicted on the print, he sees paradoxically the very same gallery that he is standing in. A lot is known about the way in which Escher made his lithograph. It is not nearly as well known that it contains a hidden `Droste effect‘, or infinite repetition; but this is brought to light by a mathematical analysis of the studies used by Escher. On the basis of this discovery, a team of mathematicians at Leiden produced a series of hallucinating computer animations. These show, among others, what happens inside the mysterious spot in the middle of the lithograph that Escher left blank.

Hendrik Lenstra received his doctorate from the University of Amsterdam in 1977 and became a professor there in 1978. In 1987 he was appointed to the faculty of the University of California, Berkeley; starting in 1998, he divided his time between Berkeley and the University of Leiden, until 2003, when he retired from Berkeley to take a full-time position at Leiden. He was awarded the Spinoza prize in 1998, and on 24 April 2009 he was made a Knight of the Order of the Netherlands Lion. Lenstra has worked principally in computational number theory and is well known as the discoverer of the elliptic curve factorization method and a co-discoverer of the Lenstra–Lenstra–Lovász lattice basis reduction algorithm.

Hendrik Lenstra is currently Hirzebruch Visiting Professor at the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in Bonn.

A team of mathematicians is working together on a big project. Excitement of discovery, hope and disappointment, competition and recognition are shown from an infinitely close distance. Scientists united by the idea of discretization, which, in short, means: constructing continuous objects from basic building blocks. Akin to the scientists’ search for the right discretization of continuum, this film itself is composed of fragments – individual characters of different ages, temperaments and scientific approaches – which form a single continuous melody. The question of where the boundaries lie between mathematics and the lives of those who are involved in it and how much they are willing to sacrifice is as important as the search for precise scientific answers. A unique and unprecedented dive into the unknown world of mathematicians.

Entry is free; there will be time for discussion after the movie.

More information about the movie project can be found here .

Was tun Mathematikerinnen und Mathematiker? Ekaterina Eremenko, erfahrene Berliner Filmemacherin („Colors of Maths“), zeigt einen Blick durchs Schlüsselloch in die rätselhafte Welt der Mathematik in ihrem neuen Dokumentarfilm: Sie hat ein Team von Forscherinnen und Forschern über ein Jahr lang mit der Kamera begleitet. Das Ergebnis ist ein einzigartiger und künstlerischer Film über Begeisterung, Hoffnung und Bangen, Konkurrenz und Anerkennung in der Mathematik. Die in dem Film portraitierte Forschergruppe arbeitet weltweit an dem Problem der Diskretisierung kontinuierlicher Objekte und Prozesse, im Zentrum steht ein Team an der TU Berlin, angesiedelt am Sonderforschungsbereich „Diskretisierung in Geometrie und Dynamik". Ekaterina Eremenko zeigt Größen wie John Nash und Freeman Dyson und den Arbeitsalltag: Wie ringen die Berliner Wissenschaftler um Lösungen, wie bringen sie ihr Leben mit der Mathematik in Einklang?  

Der Eintritt ist frei; nach dem Film gibt es die Möglichkeit, über das Gesehene zu diskutieren.

Weitere Informationen zum Filmprojekt finden Sie hier .

"Mathematics is not only a solo gig. When two or three mathematicians get together to share their ideas on how to attack a problem, sessions can easily stretch out for hours and even days. The dynamic is not unlike jazz musicians improvising with each spurring the other to go farther than they would go alone." Rob Schneiderman, New York based mathematician, regular guest at the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics, and professional Jazz pianist together with John Goldsby (bass) and Hans Dekker (drums) will explore the relations between Jazz & Math in a public concert and an open discussion. (Free admission)

Rob Schneiderman was born in Boston, Massachusetts, and raised in California. His Jazz career began in San Diego playing piano for visiting soloists such as Eddie Harris or Harold Land. A move to New York in 1982 led to performing and touring experience with famous jazz musicians like Chet Baker, James Moody and Clifford Jordan, including trips to Europe and Japan. Rob Schneiderman has released several recordings as leader for the Reservoir Music label. These CDs contain over twenty Schneiderman originals as well as arrangements of many standards.

As a jazz educator, Rob Schneiderman taught as an adjunct professor in the Jazz departments of both William Paterson University and Queens College New York in addition  to giving numerous workshops and teaching many students privately. He has also been on the faculty of The Jazz School in Berkeley.

In May 2001 Rob Schneiderman received a Ph.D. in Mathematics. After stints at the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in Bonn, the Courant Institute at New York University, and the University of Pennsylvania, he is currently on the faculty of the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science at Lehman College, City University of New York. His area of interest is Low-dimensional Topology.  

John Goldsby has been a member of the Westdeutscher Rundfunk Big Band (also known as the WDR Big Band or the Cologne Radio Big Band) since 1994. He was born and raised in Louisville, Kentucky. He played piano, guitar and electric bass before taking up the double bass at the age of 18. From 1980 to 1994, John Goldsby lived in New York City and was a fixture on the jazz scene there. He continues to contribute to the art form as a bassist, bandleader, composer, teacher, clinician and author. During his years in New York, he recorded with many world-class musicians, including Scott Hamilton, Mel Lewis, John Lewis, and the American Jazz Orchestra.

John Goldsby is well-known as a jazz educator and currently teaches at the Folkwang-Hochschule in Essen. He has also taught at the Cologne Musikhochschule, William Paterson College, Long Island University, and Columbia University. He has given jazz workshops all over the world and has written several books on jazz bass techniques.  

Hans Dekker was born in Boekelo in the Netherlands and began to play the drums at the age of nine. He was introduced to jazz music by his father, who took him to an Art Blakey concert. After high school, Hans Dekker studied at the Amsterdam Academy of Music and started working with well-known Dutch and German musicians and orchestras. He plays regularly with famous jazz musicians, such as Scott Hamilton, Bob Brookmeyer, Dee Dee Bridgewater and world class ensembles, such as the Metropole Orchestra, Brussels Jazz Orchestra, Dutch Jazz Orchestra, and Jazz Orchestra of the Concertgebouw.

Hans Dekker has been on the faculty at the Institute of Arts in Enschede since 1995. He was a regular visiting instructor at the German Federal Jazz Orchestra (Bundesjazzorchester). Since 2005 is a member of the WDR Big Band.

The music theorist Thomas Noll, currently a guest at the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics, will give a public lecture about his research on the relation between music and mathematics.

Download commented slides of the talk (pdf)

Abstract: Music theorists emphasize the historical anchors of their field and trace the history of ideas as a substantial part of their collective knowledge. Mathematical investigations offer a complementary approach, where mathematical redefinitions of historically grown concepts are studied with respect to their logical interdependencies. Within the last three decades a fruitful dialogue between the two types of investigation emerged. In my talk, I will share some instances where central elements of traditional knowledge appear in a promising new light after mathematical investigation. For instance, the decomposition of the dorian mode d-e-f-g-a-b-c-(d) into a species of the fifth (tone semitone tone tone) and a species of the fourth (tone semitone tone) suggests the consideration of an automorphism f(a) = abaa, f(b) = aba of the free group F2 over the generators a and b. Starting from such a definition, various music-theoretically relevant issues around diatonicity can then be re-interpreted on the basis of known facts from algebraic combinatorics on words. But also fundament progressions, a main subject in harmonic tonality, can be revisited in this context. In addition to the illustrative role of these examples I will attempt to position them within ongoing projects in mathematical music theory. The applied mathematical concepts include group actions, monoid actions, algebraic combinatorics on words, formal concept analysis, and discrete Fourier transforms.

Thomas Noll (Germany/Spain) works in mathematical music theory as his main research area. He studied mathematics (diploma) in Jena and semiotics (PhD) at the TU Berlin. From 1998 - 2003 he was the leader of an interdisciplinary research group on mathematical and computational music theory at that same university. After two years of teaching in theoretical informatics at the TU Berlin he works since 2005 as a lecturer in music theory at the Escola Superior de Musica de Catalunya in Barcelona. He was co-editor of the "Journal of Mathematics and Music" (2006 - 2012) and serves as reviewer for several journals and conferences in the field. He also is active in popularizing mathematical music theory for a wider audience. He is currently a guest at the MPIM collaborating with guest Thomas Fiore (Topology).

From composers to painters, writers to choreographers, the mathematician’s palette of shapes, patterns and numbers has proved a powerful inspiration. Often subconsciously artists are drawn to the same structures that fascinate mathematicians as they constantly hunt for interesting new structures to frame their creative process. Through the work of artists like Borges and Dali, Messiaen and Laban, Professor du Sautoy will explore the hidden mathematical ideas that underpin their creative output and reveal that the work of the mathematician is also driven by strong aesthetic values.

Marcus du Sautoy is the Charles Simonyi Professor for the Public Understanding of Science and Professor of Mathematics at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of New College. In 2001 he won the prestigious Berwick Prize of the London Mathematical Society awarded every two years to reward the best mathematical research made by a mathematician under 40. In 2004 Esquire Magazine chose him as one of the 100 most influential people under 40 in Britain and in 2008 he was included in the prestigious directory Who’s Who. In 2009 he was awarded the Royal Society’s Faraday Prize, the UK’s premier award for excellence in communicating science.

He is author of numerous academic articles and books on mathematics. He has been a visiting Professor at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in Bonn, the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and the Australian National University in Canberra.

Marcus du Sautoy is author of the best-selling popular mathematics book "The Music of the Primes" published by Fourth Estate in 2003 and translated into 10 languages. It has won two major prizes in Italy and Germany for the best popular science book of the year. Marcus du Sautoy writes for the Times, Daily Telegraph, Independent and the Guardian and is frequently asked for comment on BBC radio and television. For several years he had a regular column in the Times called Sexy Science. He was presenter of BBC4’s TV game show Mind Games, for which he was nominated for the Royal Society of Television’s Best Newcomer to a Network award. He has written and presented several series for radio including: 5 Shapes for BBC radio 4 in 2004 and Maths and Music for the Essay on BBC radio 3 in 2007 and The Baroque: from ecstasy to infinity for BBC radio 3 in 2009. In 2010 he wrote and presented a ten part series for BBC Radio 4 called A Short History of Mathematics.

The Hirzebruch Lecture is an annual one hour lecture for a general academic audience featuring a prominent speaker, which aims at illustrating the relation between mathematics and other fields like society, art, etc. It has been established on the occasion of Prof. Friedrich Hirzebruch's 80th birthday in 2007 and is organized by MPIM in collaboration with the University Club and the Hausdorff Center for Mathematics in Bonn. It is followed by a reception.