38. Gauß-Vorlesung
22. November 2022 Paulinum, Beginn: 18.30 Uhr
Discrete or Continuous?
László Lovász (ELTE/Rényi, Budapest)
From Zeno's paradoxes to quantum physics, the question of the continuous nature of our world has been prominent and remains unanswered. From a mathematical point of view, discrete structures or models behave quite differently from continuous ones. The great success story of mathematics from the 18-th century has been the development of analysis. Discrete mathematics had a later start, with a large boost from computers.
However, these worlds are not as far apart as they seem. Computers force us to approximate continuous structures by finite ones; but perhaps more surprisingly, very large finite structures can be very well approximated by continuous structures, often getting rid of inconvenient details. These approaches cross-fertilize each other.
Bio
László Lovász obtained his doctoral degree in mathematics from the Eötvös Loránd University (Budapest, Hungary, 1971). He is a member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Leopoldina, and several other Academies. He served as President of the International Mathematical Union and President of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. His awards include the Wolf Prize, the Kyoto Prize and the Abel Prize. His field of research is discrete mathematics, its applications to the theory of computing, and its interactions with classical mathematics.
Vor dem Hauptvortrag hält Dr. Renate Tobies (Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena) einen historischen Vortrag:
