Adventures in Mathematics
German-wide Series of Events Related to the Millenium Problems to Start in June
№ 073/2022 from May 18, 2022
The German-wide series of events “The 7 Greatest Adventures in Mathematics” starts in June. The initiators of the series, Die Junge Akademie and the German Mathematical Association, invite you on an adventurous journey through some of the most central questions in mathematics, the Millennium Problems. In 2000, the Clay Mathematics Institute published a list of seven fundamental mathematical problems. Since then, these mathematical problems, also called Millennium Problems, have been considered to be the central problems of mathematics. With one exception, the Poincaré Conjecture, they remain unsolved to this day. This year, from June to November 2022, various mathematical research institutions in Germany are organizing events devoted to one of these mathematical problems. As part of the events, well-known mathematicians will explain their fascination for the subject and convey to laypersons how current mathematical research works. The main goal of the event series is to raise interest in mathematics. The events are being supported by the German Research Foundation. At some of the locations, there will be special events for high school students.
“We are very pleased to finally be able to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of the Millennium Problems with outstanding experts at excellent research locations,” says Timo de Wolff, a member of Die Junge Akademie and one of the initiators of the series of events as well as a mathematician at Technische Universität Braunschweig. “Doing mathematics is a lot like an adventure trip: setting out into the unknown, being on your own, requiring ingenuity to find a solution, but of course also failure, and at some point the overwhelming joy when you discover something. We hope that as many people as possible will be able to experience the excitement of mathematics,” added Sebastian Stiller, also an initiator of the series and a mathematician at Technische Universität Braunschweig.
The official kick-off event on June 15, 2022, is being organized by the Mathematics Cluster of Excellence Cluster at Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität Münster on the Millennium Problem “Birch and Swinnerton-Dyer Conjecture.”
The following institutions are involved in the series of events:
- Berlin, DFG Cluster of Excellence, MATH+:
P versus NP Problem
- University of Bonn, DFG Cluster of Excellence, Hausdorff Center for Mathematics:
Riemann Hypothesis
- Technische Universität Braunschweig and Leibniz Universität Hannover:
Navier-Stokes Equation
- Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg, DFG Cluster of Excellence, Structures:
Poincaré Conjecture
- Technische Universität München and Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München:
Hodge Conjecture
- Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität Münster, DFG Cluster of Excellence, Mathematics Münster:
Birch and Swinnerton-Dyer Conjecture
More information on the Millennium Problems, the events, and the locations can be found on the website www.7abenteuer.diejungeakademie.de or at the hashtag #7Abenteuer. Die Junge Akademie is a co-initiator of the series of events and is also involved as the organizer of the closing event dealing with the Yang-Mills equations, planned for November 2022.
Die Junge Akademie was founded in 2000 as a joint project of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities and the German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina. It is the first academy of outstanding young academics worldwide. Its members come from all the academic disciplines as well as the arts. They sound out the potential and limits of interdisciplinary work in new projects, they aim to create dialog between academia and society, and they bring new impulses to the discussion on research policy. Die Junge Akademie is supported jointly by the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities (BBAW) and the German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina. Its office is in Berlin.