Department of Mathematics
The Mathematics Department of the Faculty of Mathematics and Computer Science is divided into three institutes and one affiliated scientific institution. The Mathematical Institute and the Institute for Numerical and Applied Mathematics are located in historic buildings in the southern part of the university, while the Institute for Mathematical Stochastics and the Felix Bernstein Institute for Mathematical Statistics in the Life Sciences are located in modern buildings in the northern part of the University of Göttingen. The institutes of the Department of Mathematics are home to four research areas that receive substantial third-party funding and are highly successful in their research. In addition to excellent opportunities for doctoral studies, the Department of Mathematics also offers an attractive study program that, in addition to conventional bachelor's and master's degree programs and a teacher training program with various subject combinations, also takes into account the latest developments in the field of data science with its bachelor's degree program in Mathematical Data Science. With a very successful past behind them, in which David Hilbert and Emmy Noether laid the foundations of modern mathematics in Göttingen, the international research environment of the Göttingen Campus, which establishes and facilitates a creative exchange of ideas and effective partnerships in research and teaching across disciplinary boundaries, as well as an atmosphere that embodies the Göttingen Spirit, Göttingen mathematics offers numerous attractive features. Mathematician Prof. Dr. Eva Miranda from Barcelona will be a guest at the Mathematical Institute in Göttingen in 2024/25 as Gauss Professor of the Lower Saxony Academy of Sciences. Since the 1950s, the prestigious Gauss Professorship has invited outstanding international scientists from Carl Friedrich Gauss's fields of work to conduct research in Göttingen for several months and exchange ideas with the academic community. Eva Miranda is the first mathematician to receive this award.
On March 12, Dr. Shayan Hundrieser was awarded the prize for statistics by the Stochastics Section of the German Mathematical Society (DMV). The prize, worth €1,000, is awarded every two years and recognizes the best dissertation in probability theory and statistics in Germany. The winner presented his work to more than 500 participants at this year's DMV conference, the German Probability Theory and Statistics Days in Dresden.
In response to the increasingly disparate prerequisites among first-year students for a successful start to their studies, the mathematics department in Göttingen established preparatory courses and preliminary courses at an early stage, in which school material is refreshed and knowledge gaps are closed before the actual start of studies. In a next phase, the Göttingen Faculty of Mathematics is now also modernizing the actual study program. This will make it easier to get started with abstract mathematics in particular.
CampusPost — Experimental measurements in the natural sciences today efficiently produce large amounts of data. However, modern technologies often provide information only indirectly, and the data is frequently subject to significant noise. “The main challenge today is often to extract meaningful information from this data”, says Prof. Dr. Thorsten Hohage from the Institute for Numerical and Applied Mathematics. He is the spokesperson for the Collaborative Research Center (SFB) 1456 at the University of Göttingen. Only in German! CampusPost — The Mathematical Institute at the University of Göttingen holds a curious item: the so-called Göttingen Suitcase. It contains the solution to how a regular 65,537-sided polygon can be constructed using only a compass and a ruler.
Carl Friedrich Gauss was able to show as early as 1796 that a regular 17-sided polygon can be constructed using a compass and ruler. However, this did not answer the question of whether a regular n-sided polygon can be constructed. Gauss did not formulate the conditions under which this is possible until five years later. About a hundred years later, Johann Gustav Hermes spent years working on calculating the construction of a regular 65,537-sided polygon. Only in German! CampusPost — Just over 40 years ago today, the Central Bank Council of the Deutsche Bundesbank gave the go-ahead for the development of a new series of banknotes. In the years that followed, a committee selected “portraits of personalities from German history” for the front of the banknotes, which were supplemented by images depicting their achievements. And so it came to pass that, from April 1991, the Göttingen scholar Carl Friedrich Gauss found his way into our wallets — on the 10-mark note. Only in German! The formulas in the notebook! The math teacher can surely help. Odenburg finds her with her students in the Mini-Mathematikum at the Forum Wissen. Gear wheels, puzzles, soap bubbles — the curious journalist discovers a lot before he gets the answer he's been looking for. (4:53) Only in German! One of the things that children should learn in mathematics lessons is that mathematics is a powerful tool for describing, explaining, and manipulating the world. Currently, school textbooks and final exams hardly contain any problems that do not have some kind of real-world connection. Do the problems achieve the desired effect? Is a factual connection being “far-fetched” and the mathematics merely ‘packaged’? Göttingen mathematics professor Sebastian Bauer discusses this in the “Alumni Göttingen Online” series. (41:26) Only in German! Well prepared for research and business: The research-oriented Master's Degree programme in Mathematics (M.Sc.) offers numerous options for individual specialisation. With excellent capacity for analytical thought, graduates of Göttingen are in high demand in various areas of research as well as in industry and business. This degree also allows students to pursue doctoral studies for example in one of the interdisciplinary research training groups at the University of Göttingen. This graduate programme takes place in an international and interdisciplinary atmosphere which characterises the reputation of Mathematics at Göttingen. (5:59)
Mathematics
Latest news
Eva Miranda as Gauss Professor in Göttingen
Göttingen doctoral student wins award from the German Mathematical Society
Modernization of mathematics degree programs at Georg August University of Göttingen
Mathematics at the University and Göttingen Campus
The mathematics of the experiment
What's inside the Göttingen Suitcase?
Paying with the “Princeps mathematicorum”
Mathematics in sound and images
Hands-on math | Odenburg's Odyssey (6/7) | Forum Wissen Göttingen
Real-world connections in mathematics lessons – but how?
Studying Mathematics in Göttingen
