Press Release | WIAS | 25-01-2011

International Mathematical Union will open its permanent office in Berlin

Press invitation: On 1 February, the International Mathematical Union (IMU) will open its permanent office at the Weierstrass Institute in Berlin. The opening ceremony will be performed by IMU president Prof. Ingrid Daubechies.

International Mathematical Union will open its permanent office in Berlin

 

On 1 February, the International Mathematical Union (IMU) will open its permanent office at the Weierstrass Institute in Berlin. The opening ceremony will be performed by IMU president Prof. Ingrid Daubechies of Duke University (USA) together with Dr. Georg Schütte, State Secretary of the Federal Ministry of Education and Research, and Berlin’s Senator of Science, Prof. Jürgen Zöllner.

For the first time in its almost 100-year history, the IMU is setting up a permanent office. During a multi-stage selection procedure, Berlin as a location prevailed over bids from Toronto, Rio de Janeiro and other places. The decision was made by the General Assembly of the IMU at the International Congress of Mathematicians in August 2010 in India.

The Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) and the Berlin Senate support the office with half a million euros per year. This office will be the location where the IMU secretary resides – currently Prof. Martin Grötschel, TU and Zuse Institute (ZIB) Berlin. It will be headed by the deputy director of the Weierstrass Institute (WIAS), Prof. Alexander Mielke.

Berlin, with the mathematical faculties of its three major universities as well as renowned research institutes such as the WIAS and the ZIB, has become established as a major global location for mathematics. Together, the five institutions run two Centres of Excellence of the German Research Foundation (DFG): the DFG research centre MATHEON and the Berlin Mathematical School (BMS). The city is home to more than 3000 students of mathematics and around 80 professors of mathematics. At WIAS, an institute of the Leibniz Association, about 120 scientists engage in mathematical research applied to complex problems in industry and commerce.

The International Mathematical Union (IMU) supports international collaboration in all fields of mathematics. Every four years, it organises the International Congress of Mathematicians, where it also awards the Fields medals. The Fields medal is one of the highest awards in mathematics. It is considered to be equivalent to the Nobel Prize, which is not awarded for mathematics. The IMU establishes the necessary structures in developing countries to allow as many talented mathematicians as possible to develop their skills. Last but not least, the IMU promotes a positive image of mathematics among the public and is also devoted to improving the teaching of mathematics in schools and universities.

The opening ceremony of the IMU office will take place on 1 February 2011 at 3.30 p.m. in the Hotel Hilton at Gendarmenmarkt (opposite the new office).Members of the press are cordially invited.

To register, please send an email to torsten.koehler@wias-berlin.de.

The president of the IMU, Prof. Daubechies, Secretary Prof. Grötschel, as well as WIAS Director Prof. Sprekels and other representatives will be available for interviews on request.

Contact

Weierstrass Institute for Applied Analysis and Stochastics (WIAS)
Dr. Torsten Köhler
Mohrenstr. 39
10117 Berlin
Germany
Tel. 030 20372-582
Fax 030 2044975
Email: torsten.koehler@wias-berlin.de


Background information:

Prof. Ingrid Daubechies: “Children like to tinker”
Prof. Daubechies, who is originally from Belgium, is the first woman to hold office as president of the IMU, a position she has occupied since January 2011. Also since January 2011, she has been professor at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina. Prior to that, she was head of the mathematics faculty at Princeton University (USA), where she was the first female full professor of mathematics. The Daubechies wavelets, which are named after her, are widely used in signal processing, in particular in signal compression, and are for instance used with the JPEG 2000 standard for image compression. Daubechies is member of the US National Academy of Sciences and has received many awards, including the Pioneer Prize of the International Council for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (ICIAM), for her pioneering achievements in applied mathematics. Ingrid Daubechies is married to mathematician Robert Calderbank. They have two children.

After her election as IMU president in August 2010, she talked in an interview about how mathematics can become more attractive for young researchers and, in particular, for women:

“The kind of logical thinking that is at the basis of mathematics is universal, enjoyed by most people,” she said. “Think about sports: very few people can play at the Olympic Games level, but that doesn't stop most people from enjoying playing some sport. Similarly, most people can enjoy mathematics, even though very advanced mathematics is the province of a small number of people only. We should also convey to children that mathematics is not just the formulaic, technical material to which it often gets reduced, at school.”

Addressing the key issue of more women in mathematics, Daubechies said, "The relative scarcity of women is a cultural phenomenon." Once the pattern is broken, she said, "the field will start attracting more women who, in turn, will be role models.“
(Full interview: timesofindia.indiatimes.com/rssfeeds/articleshow/6427635.cms)
About her own way into mathematics, she says the following:

„I was always interested in how things worked and how to make things. For instance, I really like weaving and pottery, and I have liked this kind of craft pursuits since my childhood. But I also was interested in seeing how machinery worked, or in why certain mathematical things were true (like the fact that a number is divisible by nine if, when you add all its digits together, you get another number divisible by 9---try it with 73512 and 8577, both multiples of 9; there is also a rule for divisibility by 7, although it is not quite as simple).

Here are a few childhood memories: When I was eight or nine, the thing I liked best when playing with my dolls was to sew clothes for them. I liked trying to make patterns that would fit them well---it was fascinating to me that by putting together flat pieces of fabric one could make something that was not flat at all, but followed curved surfaces. Around the same time, when I couldn't fall asleep at night, I would compute the powers of 2 in my head: 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, … (multiplying by 2 every time). The numbers became very large very quickly but I would keep going quite a while. It was fascinating, again, to see how fast these numbers grew. Years later, when I met my husband, I was mused to learn that he used to do this too.“

( http://www.math.princeton.edu/~ingrid/personalbio.html )

Find out more about Ingrid Daubechies and her research “Wave of the Future” in Discover Magazine http://discovermagazine.com/1995/may/waveofthefuture505