Hector Fellow since 2012
Prof. Günter M. ZieglerProf. Günter M. Ziegler
Discrete Geometry Group, Freie Universität Berlin
Günter M. Ziegler has been President of Freie Universität Berlin since July 2018.
He is an internationally highly respected mathematician who has become known, among other things, for the construction and analysis of complex geometric structures, as well as by the development and the successful use of deeper topological methods for problems stemming from different areas such as for division problems and in optimization.
Günter M. Ziegler was awarded, among others, the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize of the German Research Foundation (DFG) and an Advanced Grant of the European Research Council (ERC). He is a member of the Executive Board of the German Mathematical Society, Chairman of the Steering Committee of Wissenschaft im Dialog (WiD) and a member of the Executive Board of the International Mathematical Union (IMU). He is, inter alia, a member of the National Academy of Sciences (Leopoldina), the German National Academy of Science and Engineering (acatech) and a fellow of the American Mathematical Society.
"Our Mathematical Future"
The talk by Professor Günter M. Ziegler
Symposium of the Hector Fellow Academy on July 11, 2016 in cooperation with the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities.
Video in German.
Discrete Mathematics / Geometry, Topology and Optimization
Research fields
My current work in Discrete Geometry focuses on 4‑dimensional polytopes, constructions, enumerative properties (such as f‑vectors, see [1]), their graphs, as well as inscribability questions, cf. [2]. Our topological investigations deal with the existence of equivariant maps, in order to solve problems in Discrete Geometry, such as the existence of hyperplane mass partitions [3]. The Topological Tverberg Problem is another outstanding problem, where the recent counter-examples — see [4] — raise a lot of new questions.
[1] Philip Brinkmann & Günter M. Ziegler: A flag vector of a 3‑sphere that is not the flag vector of a 4‑polytope, Preprint, November 2015, 12 pages, http://arxiv.org/abs/1506.08148
[2] Arnau Padrol & Günter M. Ziegler: Six topics on inscribable polytopes,
to appear in Alexander I. Bobenko, editor, Advances in Discrete Differential Geometry, Springer, Heidelberg, 2016. http://arxiv.org/abs/1511.03458
[3] Pavle V.~M. Blagojevic, Florian Frick, Albert Haase & Günter M. Ziegler: Topology of the Grünbaum—Hadwiger—Ramos hyperplane mass partition problem, Preprint, 27 pages, February 2015, http://arxiv.org/abs/1502.02975
[4] Pavle V. M. Blagojevic, Florian Frick & Günter M. Ziegler: Counterexamples to the Topological Tverberg Conjecture and other applications of the constraint method, Preprint, 6 pages, Oktober 2015, http://arxiv.org/abs/1510.07984