Hirzebruch Lecture "AI and humanity's long conversation"Public Event
by
Konviktstr. 9 - Wolfgang-Paul-Saal
Bonner Universitätsclub
Geordie Williamson will deliver the Friedrich Hirzebruch lecture 2026 on November 3, at 18:30h at the University Club Bonn on
"AI and humanity's long conversation".
The annual Friedrich Hirzebruch Lecture is jointly organized by the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics and the Hausdorff Center for Mathematics. The lectures are for a general audience and aim at illustrating the relation between mathematics and art, society, and other fields. If you would like to attend, you are kindly requested to register here:
Geordie Williamson was born in Australia, in 1981. He studied at the University of Sydney, graduating in 2003 with a Bachelor of Arts with honours and the University Medal. He then moved to Germany, where he completed his PhD at the University of Freiburg in 2008 under the supervision of Wolfgang Soergel, with a thesis on singular Soergel bimodules. He spent the following three years at the University of Oxford as an EPSRC postdoctoral fellow and Junior Research Fellow at St Peter's College, and from 2011 to 2016 he was Advanced Researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in Bonn. In 2017 he was appointed Professor of Mathematics at the University of Sydney, and since 2018 he has been Director of the Sydney Mathematical Research Institute. He works in geometric representation theory; among his central results are the proof, with Ben Elias, of Soergel's conjecture — and with it the Kazhdan–Lusztig positivity conjecture of 1979 — the discovery of counterexamples to the James conjecture and to the expected bounds in the Lusztig conjecture, and a new proof of the Jantzen conjectures. Geordie Williamson has received a number of distinctions for his work: in 2016 the Chevalley Prize of the American Mathematical Society, the Prize of the European Mathematical Society and a Clay Research Award, and the 2017 New Horizons in Mathematics Prize (jointly with Ben Elias). In 2018 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society and a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science, was a plenary speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Rio, and received the Australian Mathematical Society Medal, followed in 2019 by the Christopher Heyde Medal of the Australian Academy of Science. He was Distinguished Visiting Professor at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton in 2020/21 and received the NSW Premier's Prize for Excellence in 2022. In 2024 he became the first Australian to be awarded the Max Planck-Humboldt Research Award, and he holds an ARC Laureate Professorship at the University of Sydney (2024–2029).
MPIM und HCM