Institut für Mathematik und Informatik

Please let us know in advance which technical equipment you plan to use. We have rooms with large chalkboard, with a beamer, or both (also for simultaneous use).

The audience of your talk includes faculty and students of diverse mathematical backgrounds (pure & applied math, and computer science).

We kindly request that your talk be about 50 minutes in length, aimed at a general audience, and accessible to graduate students.

In particular, your talk should not be directed towards an audience of experts as is common in area-specific seminars. It is not necessary to present details on your latest research results. However, discussing their global meaning and consequences can be very valuable, and giving some historical perspective of your topic and explaining why it is of interest to you and your community can be an excellent start. Please do not feel obliged to explain all ideas in a fully rigorous way.

Indeed, most of the audience will very much appreciate a slightly informal approach to new topics and concepts.

We thank you very much in advance, and we are looking forward to your talk!

See also John McCarthy’s 'How to give a good colloquium'

In differential geometry and in mathematical physics "discretization" means replacing a continuum system (like for example a smooth surface in three-space) by a discrete collection of lower-dimensional objects (like curves or even isolated points). It is often possible to capture many important properties of the original continuum system in its discrete equivalent.

Ulrich Pinkall is specialized in differential geometry and computer graphics. He studied mathematics at the University of Freiburg with a Diplom in 1979 and a doctorate in 1982 with thesis Dupin´sche Hyperflächen under the supervision of Martin Barner. Pinkall was then a research assistant in Freiburg until 1984 and from 1984 to 1986 at the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in Bonn. In 1985 he completed his habilitation in Bonn with thesis Totale Absolutkrümmung immersierter Flächen. Since 1986 he is professor at TU Berlin.

In 1985 he received the Otto Hahn Medal of the Max Planck Society and in 1986 he received a Heisenberg-Stipendium from the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG). From 1992 to 2003 he was a speaker of the Sonderforschungsbereich (SFB) 288 (differential geometry and quantum physics). Together with Franz Pedit he was an Invited Speaker with talk Quaternionic analysis of Riemann surfaces and differential geometry at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Berlin in 1998.