Fascinated by symmetries – Anna Wienhard appointed director at the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in the Sciences

The Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in the Sciences in Leipzig welcomes mathematics professor Anna Wienhard as its new director. Her newly established research group focuses on fundamental research in the areas of geometry, group theory, and dynamics, and explores applications and interactions with other sciences. Anna Wienhard moves to Leipzig from Heidelberg University.

With Professor Anna Wienhard, the Max Planck Institute in Leipzig has gained an outstanding scientist who also cares deeply about the close connection between mathematics and other sciences as well as about science communication. “I strongly believe in the unity of mathematics, in the fruitful interplay between fundamental research in mathematics and the exploration of applications of mathematics in other sciences. The Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in the Sciences in Leipzig is an ideal place for me to pursue this. It is a place of deep and cutting-edge research in mathematics, and at the same time a place where mathematicians are open to interact with researchers from other sciences,” Anna Wienhard is looking forward to her time in Leipzig.

Over the past years Anna Wienhard has played a key role in building up the highly interdisciplinary Cluster of Excellence STRUCTURES at Heidelberg. Although she describes herself as more of a theoretical mathematician, she sees great potential in connecting, even quite theoretical, mathematicians with scientists from other areas to explore applications of mathematical concepts beyond the well-known mathematical methods. She would like to expand this further in Leipzig.

In Anna Wienhard’s research there is a strong connection to certain areas in physics, in particular the study of quantum field theories. “But I am not only exploring connections of my most current research in mathematics in the sciences. I am also interested in exploring where concepts from geometry and topology, which might be already well-established in these areas, can be used and applied in other areas,” is how she outlines her research spectrum.

Symmetries play a key role in Anna Wienhard’s work. She is interested in actions of groups of symmetries, as well as in spaces with very rich symmetry groups. Such symmetric spaces generalize the well-known Euclidean spaces, and at the same time the perhaps less well-known hyperbolic spaces. They provide very rich geometries which are still computationally tractable. Anna Wienhard and her research team are using this rich geometry and some interesting features of symmetric spaces for graph representations and machine learning applications, for example.