The Oberwolfach Research Institute for Mathematics (german: Mathematisches Forschungsinstitut Oberwolfach) is a center for mathematical research in

Oberwolfach Oberwolfach ( gsw, label= Low Alemannic, Obberwolfä) is a town in the district of Ortenau in Baden-Württemberg, Germany. It is the site of the Oberwolfach Research Institute for Mathematics, or Mathematisches Forschungsinstitut Oberwolfach. Ge ...

Germany Germany,, officially the Federal Republic of Germany, is a country in Central Europe. It is the second most populous country in Europe after Russia, and the most populous member state of the European Union. Germany is situated betwe ...

. It was founded by mathematician

Wilhelm Süss Wilhelm Süss (7 March 1895 – 21 May 1958) was a German mathematician. He was founder and first director of the Oberwolfach Research Institute for Mathematics. Biography He was born in Frankfurt, Germany, and died in Freiburg im Breisgau, Germ ...

in 1944. It organizes weekly workshops on diverse topics where mathematicians and scientists from all over the world come to do collaborative research. The Institute is a member of the

Leibniz Association The Leibniz Association (German: ''Leibniz-Gemeinschaft'' or ''Wissenschaftsgemeinschaft Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz'') is a union of German non-university research institutes from various disciplines. As of 2020, 96 non-university research insti ...

, funded mainly by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research and by the state of

Baden-Württemberg Baden-Württemberg (; ), commonly shortened to BW or BaWü, is a German state () in Southwest Germany, east of the Rhine, which forms the southern part of Germany's western border with France. With more than 11.07 million inhabitants across a ...

. It also receives substantial funding from the ''Friends of Oberwolfach'' foundation, from the ''Oberwolfach Foundation'' and from numerous donors.

History

The Oberwolfach Research Institute for Mathematics (MFO) was founded as the ''Reich Institute of Mathematics'' (German: ''Reichsinstitut für Mathematik'') on 1 September 1944. It was one of several research institutes founded by the

Nazis Nazism ( ; german: Nazismus), the common name in English for National Socialism (german: Nationalsozialismus, ), is the far-right totalitarian political ideology and practices associated with Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party (NSDAP) in Na ...

in order to further the German war effort, which at that time was clearly failing. The location was selected to be remote as not to be a target for ally bombing. Originally it was housed in a building called the Lorenzenhof, a large Black Forest hunting lodge. After the war, Süss, a member of the Nazi party, was suspended for two months in 1945 as part of the county's

denazification Denazification (german: link=yes, Entnazifizierung) was an Allied initiative to rid German and Austrian society, culture, press, economy, judiciary, and politics of the Nazi ideology following the Second World War. It was carried out by remov ...

efforts, but thereafter remained head of the institute. Though the institute lost its government funding, Süss was able to keep it going with other grants, and contributed to rebuilding mathematics in Germany following the fall of the

Third Reich Nazi Germany (lit. "National Socialist State"), ' (lit. "Nazi State") for short; also ' (lit. "National Socialist Germany") (officially known as the German Reich from 1933 until 1943, and the Greater German Reich from 1943 to 1945) was ...

by hosting international mathematical conferences. Some of these were organised by

Reinhold Baer Reinhold Baer (22 July 1902 – 22 October 1979) was a German mathematician, known for his work in algebra. He introduced injective modules in 1940. He is the eponym of Baer rings and Baer groups. Biography Baer studied mechanical engineering f ...

, a mathematician who was expelled from University of Halle in 1933 for being Jewish, but later returned to Germany in 1956 at the University of Frankfurt. The institute regained government funding in the 1950s. After Süss's death in 1958,

Hellmuth Kneser Hellmuth Kneser (16 April 1898 – 23 August 1973) was a Baltic German mathematician, who made notable contributions to group theory and topology. His most famous result may be his theorem on the existence of a prime decomposition for 3-manifold ...

was briefly director before

Theodor Schneider __NOTOC__ Theodor Schneider (7 May 1911, Frankfurt am Main – 31 October 1988, Freiburg im Breisgau) was a German mathematician, best known for providing proof of what is now known as the Gelfond–Schneider theorem. Schneider studied from 19 ...

permanently took over in the role in 1959. In that year, he and others formed the mathematical society Gesellschaft für Mathematische Forschung e. V. in order to run the MFO. 1967: 10 October : Inauguration of the guest house of the MFO, a gift of the

Volkswagen Foundation The Volkswagen Foundation (German: ''VolkswagenStiftung'') is the largest German private nonprofit organization involved in the promotion and support of academic research. It is not affiliated to the present company, the Volkswagen Group. It wa ...

1975: 13 June : Inauguration of the library and meetings building of the MFO, which replaced the old castle, also a gift of the Volkswagen Foundation 1989: 26 May : Inauguration of the extension of the guest building 1995: Establishment of the research programme "Research in Pairs" 2005: 1 January : The MFO becomes a member of the

2007: Establishment of the post-doctoral programme "Oberwolfach Leibniz Fellows" 2007: 5 May : Inauguration of the library extension, a gift of the Klaus Tschira Stiftung and the Volkswagen Foundation 2005 – 2010: General restoration of the guest house and the library building

Statue

The iconic model of the

Boy surface In geometry, Boy's surface is an immersion of the real projective plane in 3-dimensional space found by Werner Boy in 1901. He discovered it on assignment from David Hilbert to prove that the projective plane ''could not'' be immersed in 3-space ...

was installed in front of the Institute, as a gift from

Mercedes-Benz Mercedes-Benz (), commonly referred to as Mercedes and sometimes as Benz, is a German luxury and commercial vehicle automotive brand established in 1926. Mercedes-Benz AG (a Mercedes-Benz Group subsidiary established in 2019) is headquartere ...

on 28 January 1991. The Boy Surface is named after

Werner Boy Werner Boy (; 4 May 1879 − 6 September 1914) was a German mathematician. He was the discoverer and eponym of Boy's surface—a three-dimensional projection of the real projective plane without singularities, the first of its kind. He discove ...

who constructed the surface in his 1901 thesis, written under the direction of

David Hilbert David Hilbert (; ; 23 January 1862 – 14 February 1943) was a German mathematician, one of the most influential mathematicians of the 19th and early 20th centuries. Hilbert discovered and developed a broad range of fundamental ideas in many a ...

Directors

* 1944–1958,

* 1958–1959,

* 1959–1963,

* 1963–1994,

Martin Barner Martin Barner (19 April 1921 – 31 July 2020) was a German mathematician working in the fields of differential geometry and analysis. Barner received his doctorate in 1950 at the Albert-Ludwigs-University in Freiburg. From 1957 he was professor ...

* 1994–2002,

Matthias Kreck Matthias Kreck (born 22 July 1947, in Dillenburg) is a German mathematician who works in the areas of Algebraic Topology and Differential topology. From 1994 to 2002 he was director of the Oberwolfach Research Institute for Mathematics and from ...

* 2002–2013, * 2013–present

Gerhard Huisken Gerhard Huisken (born 20 May 1958) is a German mathematician whose research concerns differential geometry and partial differential equations. He is known for foundational contributions to the theory of the mean curvature flow, including Huiske ...

Oberwolfach Prize

The Oberwolfach Prize is awarded approximately every three years for excellent achievements in changing fields of mathematics to young mathematicians not older than 35 years. It is financed by the

Oberwolfach Foundation Oberwolfach ( gsw, label= Low Alemannic, Obberwolfä) is a town in the district of Ortenau in Baden-Württemberg, Germany. It is the site of the Oberwolfach Research Institute for Mathematics, or Mathematisches Forschungsinstitut Oberwolfach. G ...

and awarded in cooperation with the institute. ;Prize winners * 1991

Peter Kronheimer Peter Benedict Kronheimer (born 1963) is a British mathematician, known for his work on gauge theory and its applications to 3- and 4-dimensional topology. He is William Caspar Graustein Professor of Mathematics at Harvard University and former ...

* 1993 and

Jens Franke Jens Franke (born 28 June 1964) is a German mathematician. He has held a chair at the University of Bonn's Hausdorff Center for Mathematics since 1992. Franke's research has covered various problems of number theory, algebraic geometry and analys ...

* 1996 and * 1998

Alice Guionnet Alice Guionnet (born 24 May 1969) is a French mathematician known for her work in probability theory, in particular on large random matrices. Biography Guionnet entered the École Normale Supérieure (Paris) in 1989. She earned her PhD in 1995 ...

* 2000

Luca Trevisan Luca Trevisan (21 July 1971) is an Italian professor of computer science at Bocconi University in Milan. His research area is theoretical computer science, focusing on randomness, cryptography, probabilistically checkable proofs, approximation, p ...

* 2003

Paul Biran Paul Ian Biran ( he, פאול בירן; born 25 February 1969) is an Israeli mathematician. He holds a chair at ETH Zurich. His research interests include symplectic geometry and algebraic geometry. Education Born in Romania in 1969, Biran's f ...

* 2007

Ngô Bảo Châu Ngô Bảo Châu (, born June 28, 1972) is a Vietnamese-French mathematician at the University of Chicago, best known for proving the fundamental lemma for automorphic forms (proposed by Robert Langlands and Diana Shelstad). He is the first Vie ...

* 2010 and * 2013

Hugo Duminil-Copin Hugo Duminil-Copin (born 26 August 1985) is a French mathematician specializing in probability theory. He was awarded the Fields Medal in 2022. Biography The son of a middle school sports teacher and a former female dancer who became a primary ...

* 2016

Jacob Fox Jacob Fox (born Jacob Licht in 1984) is an American mathematician. He is a professor at Stanford University. His research interests are in Hungarian-style combinatorics, particularly Ramsey theory, extremal graph theory, combinatorial number the ...

* 2019

Oscar Randal-Williams Oscar Randal-Williams is a British mathematician and professor at the University of Cambridge, working in topology. He studied mathematics at the University of Oxford (MMath 2006, DPhil 2009), where he wrote his doctoral thesis ''Stable moduli sp ...

References

External links

Home page of the institute

Web page about the Oberwolfach Prize
{{Authority control Leibniz Association Research institutes in Germany Mathematical institutes International research institutes Organisations based in Baden-Württemberg Research institutes established in 1944 Mathematics in Germany