15th Felix Hausdorff Lecture by Professor Dr. Andreas Thom (Dresden University of Technology, Institute of Geometry)

Modern physics deconstructs naive concepts of space and time. Nothing is as it seems. Parts of modern consciousness research suggest that consciousness is an imagination: everything happens without a real subject. At the same time, mathematics proves to be a language that enables an astonishingly deep and useful understanding of the world and abstract thinking. Nevertheless, it too remains without an ultimate foundation: Gödel's incompleteness theorems (1931) show that sufficiently strong and consistent formal systems are incomplete and cannot prove their own freedom from contradiction. Our knowledge and thinking are free-floating - an invitation to take a fresh look at certainties.

Andreas Thom is Professor of Geometry at the TU Dresden. He works at the interface of group theory, functional analysis and operator algebras. After studying in Dresden and Cambridge, he completed his doctorate in Münster in 2003 under Joachim Cuntz, became a junior professor in Göttingen in 2007 and a professor in Leipzig in 2009. His research was funded by an ERC Starting Grant (2011-2016) and an ERC Consolidator Grant (2016-2021). In 2018, he was an invited speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians.

Welcome: Professor Dr. Thomas Klinger
Moderation: Professor Dr. Ines Kath