McCormick will define submodularity and survey some of its applications in a variety of areas, and eventually outline what advantages it brings to the associated optimization problems. S. Thomas McCormick is the W.J. Van Dusen Professor of Management at the Sauder School of Business at the University of British Columbia.

In this lecture, Viazovska will show that the E8 and Leech lattices minimize energy for a wide class of potential functions. This theorem implies recently proven optimality of E8 and Leech lattices as sphere packings and broadly generalizes it to long-range interactions. Maryna Viazovska obtained her PhD in 2013 at the University of Bonn. At EPFL, she was promoted full professor in 2018.

In this talk, Max von Kleist will present approaches that utilize primary and secondary data of SARS-CoV-2 that allow to permanently monitor and assess the pandemic and that can support the choice of containment strategies. Max von Kleist currently heads the “Project Group 5: Systems Medicine of Infectious Diseases“ at the Robert Koch Institute in Berlin.

On 21 and 22 February 2022, the Berlin Mathematical School will host for the second year in a row its online BMS Days, the annual open door event for BMS applicants and new students. On Tuesday, 22 February 2022 all events will be open to the MATH+ community. We are pleased to present the following two talks by two new colleagues and invite you to attend: Claudia Schillings (U Mannheim/ FU Berlin)...

This colloquium talk will be devoted to the discussion of the important role played by functional inequalities in many areas of mathematics, giving examples and discussing the extremal functions and the best constants of some of the inequalities. Maria J. Esteban is a senior researcher at CNRS (Centre National de Recherche Scientifique) in Paris.

Platonic solids are very special objects that exhibit an extremely high degree of symmetry. Regular polytopes are their generalization to higher dimensions and admit – no surprise – even higher degrees of symmetry. Jürgen Richter Gebert is full professor for Geometry and Visualization at the Technical University of Munich.