Günter M. Ziegler was born in Munich in 1963. After first studying mathematics and physics at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, he earned his doctorate in mathematics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge (USA) in 1987. After four postdoc years at the University of Augsburg and a research stay at Institut Mittag-Leffler in Stockholm, he came to Berlin in 1992, where he worked at the Konrad Zuse Zentrum (today’s Zuse Institute Berlin). Ziegler received his postdoctoral university instruction qualification (Habilitation) at Technische Universität Berlin, where he was professor of mathematics from January 1995 to February 2011. He began working at Freie Universität Berlin in March 2011 and commenced a concurrent position as adjunct professor at Technische Universität Berlin in May 2017. In 2006 he led the process of establishing the Berlin Mathematical School as a joint graduate school of Berlin’s three major universities.

Professor Ziegler began his first term as president of Freie Universität Berlin on July 6, 2018. He is currently serving his second term following re-election in 2022. From November 2018 to November 2020, he was the first spokesperson for the Berlin University Alliance, where he continues to serve in leadership roles: as a member of the board of directors and again as spokesperson (2024–2026). He served as a deputy chair on the executive board of the German U15 group of research-intensive universities from September 2020 to August 2022 and resumed serving on the board of German U15 in 2023, of which he continues to be a member.

As a mathematician, Günter M. Ziegler’s work has focused on problems in discrete geometry, especially the theory of polyhedra. He has also specialized in algebraic and topological methods in combinatorics and problems of optimization. In 2001, Ziegler was awarded the German Research Foundation’s Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize for his research. In 2008, he received the Communicator Award from the German Research Foundation and the Stifterverband für die deutsche Wissenschaft (Donors’ Association for the Promotion of Sciences and Humanities in Germany). In 2010, he received an Advanced Grant from the European Research Council; and in 2017, he was the recipient of the Berlin Science Prize, awarded by the Governing Mayor of Berlin. The University of Fribourg (Switzerland) granted him an honorary doctorate in 2024.

Günter M. Ziegler is a member of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities, the German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina, and acatech – Germany’s National Academy of Engineering Sciences. He is also a fellow of the American Mathematical Society. From 2006 to 2008, Ziegler was the president of the German Mathematical Society, where he still serves as a member of the executive board. In addition, he was a member of the board of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities from 2010 to 2018 and a member of the senate of the German Research Foundation from 2014 to 2018.

Ziegler is committed to promoting a diverse and lively public image of mathematics. He was instrumental in launching the “Year of Mathematics” in Germany in 2008, and currently heads the German Mathematical Society’s Media Office for Mathematics, its Office for Networking Schools and Universities, as well as the MIP.labor. From 2021 to 2022 he chaired the steering committee of Wissenschaft im Dialog (Science in Dialogue, WiD). He has been a member of the board of Urania Berlin since 2019 and chairperson of its board of trustees since 2025.

Ziegler has published numerous essays and books on mathematics and popular science. Together with Martin Aigner, he wrote Proofs from THE BOOK, which is available in fifteen languages. In 2018, the book was awarded the Steele Prize for Exposition by the American Mathematical Society. His recent book with Andreas Loos and Rainer Sinn, Panorama der Mathematik (“Panorama of Mathematics”) was published by Springer-Verlag (Heidelberg) in 2022.