Director em.,
Max-Planck-Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organization
and
Professor of Theoretical Physics,
University of Göttingen
How do the myriads of neurons in our cortex cooperate when we perceive an object or perform another task? Are there statistical principles underlying human travel and can they be used to forecast the geographic spreading of modern epidemics?
Questions like these address the complex dynamics of spatially extended or multicomponent nonlinear systems, which still reserve many surprises. In large networks of firing neurons, e.g., we found unstable attractors, a strange phenomenon which would neither have been guessed nor understood without mathematical modelling and which many physicists consider an oxymoron. The tools and mathematical methods developed in studies of chaotic behaviour in the past are helping us to clarify the dynamics and function of complex networks and spatially extended systems. Methods of time series analysis can even help us resolve long standing controversial issues of musicology.
Curriculum Vitae
Studies of Physics: | Universities of Frankfurt and Regensburg |
Dr. rer. nat. and Dr. habil.: |
University of Regensburg |
Post-Doc.: | Max-Planck-Institute for Solid State Research, Stuttgart Xerox Palo Alto Research Center |
1988-1989: | Professor of Theoretical Physics, University of Würzburg |
1989-1996: | Professor of Theoretical Physics, University of Frankfurt (Chairperson of the SFB Nonlinear Dynamics) |
1996-2016: | Professor of Theoretical Physics, University of Göttingen and Director, Max-Planck-Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organization |
2005-2013: | Founder and Chairperson, Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience (BCCN) Göttingen |
since 2016: | Director em. and head of a Max Planck emeritus group |
Awards and Fellowships
Heisenberg Fellow (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, 1983)
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, 1994)
Fellow of the American Physical Society (APS, 2008)
Gentner-Kastler Prize (Société Française de Physique and Deutsche Physikalische Gesellschaft, 2009)
Member, Göttingen Academy of Sciences and Humanities