As usual, we will have two invited speakers this year, one internal and one external. They have been chosen by popular vote. We're looking forward to their talks!
Prof. Dr. Claudio Arezzo
University of Parma
Claudio Arezzo is the head of the mathematics section at the Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics (ICTP) near Trieste. His research interests lie in differential and algebraic geometry and partial differential equations, and he is fascinated by Kähler manifolds. He is also a professor for Geometry at the University of Parma and is well known for the courses on geometry he teaches. Prof. Arezzo accomplished two PhDs, one at the Consorzio Genova-Torino in 1996 and one at the University of Warwick in 1997, and afterwards hold research positions at Stanford, MIT, the University of Genova and the University of Paris XII, before moving to the University of Parma in 2000 and joining the ICTP in 2010.
For more information, visit his webpage at the University of Parma.
(Photo source: https://www.ictp.it/member/claudio-arezzo)
Prof. Dr. Günter Ziegler
Free University of Berlin
Günter Ziegler has been a professor for Discrete Geometry und Topological Combinatorics at FU Berlin since 2011; he additionally became president of FU Berlin in 2018. Previously, from 1995 to 2011, he served as a professor at TU Berlin. His research is about discrete geometry, discrete optimization and the topology linked to that and he is highly interested in the theory of polyeders. Besides his research interests, popularization of mathematics to the general public has been very important for Günter Ziegler ever since, as he e.g. wrote two books and also together with Martin Aigner wrote the book "Proofs from THE BOOK", which stems from an idea of Erdös and collects outstandingly elegant proofs of mathematical theorems.
Ziegler holds a PhD from MIT and worked at the University of Augsburg and the Mittag-Leffler-Institute before coming to Berlin to first join the Zuse-Institute and then TU Berlin. He has already been president of the German Mathematical Society (DMV) and has been chair of BMS twice. He was awarded several awards and prizes, most notably 2001 the Gottfried-Wilhelm-Leibniz-Prize of the German Research Foundation (DFG).
More information can be found on his webpage at the mathematical institute of FU Berlin or at his webpage as president of FU Berlin.
(Photo by Sandro Most, source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%BCnter_M._Ziegler)