DFG awards mathematics prize to outstanding young researcher

This release is available in German.

Mathematician Alexander Lytchak is to receive this year's von Kaven Award for Mathematics from the von Kaven Foundation, a fund administered by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation), for his outstanding work in the field of differential geometry. The award, which includes prize money of 10,000 euros, honours Lytchak, whose work is funded by the DFG's Heisenberg Programme, mainly for his achievements in his primary research field, that of singular Riemannian foliations. Lytchak is, according to the rationale, imaginative and multi-talented with strong communication skills. He will be presented with the award during the German Mathematical Society (DMV)'s Gauss Lecture on 30 October 2009 in Aachen. DFG senator Professor Wolfgang Dahmen will give the laudation.

Alexander Lytchak was born in 1978 in Leningrad and studied mathematics in Bonn; after achieving his doctorate in 2001, he went on to qualify as a university professor in 2008. His high level of aptitude was demonstrated early on by his victory in the Russian Mathematical Olympiad in 1992 and in the German Federal Math Competitions in 1993 and 1995. Since achieving his doctorate, Lytchak's career has included work in two DFG-funded Collaborative Research Centres and in the "Foundations, Models, Applications" cluster of excellence at the University of Bonn. He maintains diverse international cooperation projects. In addition to Münster, his current Heisenberg fellowship takes him to Brazil, Canada and the USA. These international exchanges are intended to advance his work in the areas of singular Riemannian foliations and metric spaces with non-positive curvature. Both fields are cutting-edge research topics in differential geometry.