"Mirror, Mirror on the Wall": lecture by the renowned mathematician Alex Kontorovich

As part of the annual meeting of the German Mathematical Society (DMV) in Ilmenau from September 25-28, 2023, hosted by the Department of Mathematics and Natural Sciences at TU Ilmenau, a public lecture by renowned U.S. mathematician Alex Kontorovich will be held on Wednesday, September 27, at 7 p.m. in the Festhalle Ilmenau.

Alex Kontorovich is a professor of mathematics at Rutgers University. He earned his BA in mathematics at Princeton, then earned his PhD at Columbia University and taught at Brown, Stony Brook, and Yale universities, among others, before joining Rutgers University in 2014. In 2017, Kontorovich was elected a Kavli Fellow of the National Academy of Sciences and a Fellow of the American Mathematical Society. He is currently a member of the Scientific Advisory Board of Quanta Magazine, managing editor of the Journal of the Association for Mathematical Research, and dean of academic content at the National Museum of Mathematics in New York.

In his talk on "Mirror, Mirror on the Wall," the multi-talented mathematician and musician will present how geometry and arithmetic can interact in unexpected ways to form so-called fractal sphere packings from reflections in curved mirrors.