One of the most prestigious German awards for mathematics goes to Wolfgang Lück

Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg (FAU) regularly awards one of the most prestigious German awards in the field of mathematics: The Karl Georg Christian von Staudt Prize. This year, it is being awarded to Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Lück, a mathematician at the University of Bonn, in recognition of his pioneering work in modern algebraic topology and in group theory. The prize is worth 25,000 euros.

Wolfgang Lück’s main research fields are abstract structures and properties of spaces that are preserved under deformation, known as topological invariants. Such invariants contain important information for the classification of topological spaces. In particular, Wolfgang Lück researches invariants of closed manifolds, special geometric objects that look the same locally but can be different globally. In his pioneering research, Wolfgang Lück proved, among other things, the Lück approximation theorem named after him and special cases of the famous Farrell-Jones conjecture.

Der Preisträger

Wolfgang Lück studied mathematics in Göttingen where he stayed until 1990 as a research associate after his studies. He was a professor at the University of Mainz from 1991 until 1996 and from 1996 until 2010, he taught at the University of Münster. He has been working at the University of Bonn since 2010. He has won several renowned awards during his career. He received the Max Planck Research Prize in 2003, the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize in 2008 and an ERC Advanced Grant in 2015. In 2010, Lück was elected a member of the German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina and in 2013, he was elected a member of the North Rhine-Westphalian Academy of Sciences, Humanities and the Arts.

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