Teubner Foundation Science Award goes to Viviane Baladi

This year’s Science Prize for the Promotion of Mathematical Sciences goes to the Swiss-French mathematician Professor Viviane Baladi. With this award, the Benedictus Gotthelf Teubner Foundation honors her outstanding contributions to the field of dynamical systems. The public award ceremony takes place on March 1 at 11:00 am at the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in the Sciences, followed by an Institute Colloquium at 3:30 pm. We cordially invite to both festive events.

Viviane Baladi is Director of research at the Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS) in France. She is also affiliated to the Sorbonne University in Paris and the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich. Her research focuses on dynamical systems and chaos theory. Professor Jürgen Jost, director of the Max Planck Institute, will hold the laudation on Viviane Baladi. He emphasizes especially her development of novel tools, like dynamical zeta functions and spectra of transfer operators, in a central field of modern mathematics, the theory of dynamical systems. Her methods make fundamental contributions to the understanding of the mixing properties of chaotic systems.

Viviane Baladi earned her master's degrees in mathematics and computer science from the University of Geneva where she also completed her doctorate. Since her dissertation she has been working on dynamic zeta functions, which she played a key role in developing. Viviane Baladi has been a member of CNRS since 1990. Research and teaching projects also led her to the ETH Zurich and the University of Geneva. She also spent a year as Professor of Mathematics at the University of Copenhagen, and another year at CNRS-IMPA in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Her research is highly recognized. She was an invited speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians in 2014, speaking in the section on “Dynamical Systems and Ordinary Differential Equations". Viviane Baladi was awarded the CNRS Silver Medal, a membership of the Academia Europaeaa, and an ERC Grant for her project on “Smooth dynamics via operators, with singularities”.

The Teubner Prize for the Promotion of Mathematical Sciences was established in 2014 on initiative of the founder and supporter of the Teubner Foundation Jürgen Weiß. Since then, it has been awarded every two years to outstanding scientists. The prize follows on from the “Alfred Ackermann Memorial Prize for the Promotion of Mathematical Sciences”, which was awarded in Leipzig from 1914 to 1941 and whose first laureate was Felix Klein.

The Teubner Foundation was established in 2003 in the House of Books in Leipzig with the purpose of promoting science and research in the spirit of Benedictus Gotthelf Teubner. It preserves the memory of the successful Saxon publishing bookseller, company founder, book printer, typographer and Leipzig city councilor in the public awareness.