@Thomas Bruns Fotografie Berlin

Professor Jochen Brüning died at age 77 on 16^th January 2025. With him, Berlin mathematics has lost a highly respected colleague and visionary who worked across disciplinary boundaries.

Born in Hesse, Jochen Brüning studied mathematics in Marburg, where he also completed his dissertation in mathematics under Vojislav Avakumovic in 1972. From 1979, he was a professor at Universität Duisburg. He moved to Universität Augsburg in 1983 and accepted the call to Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin (HU) in 1995. From 2006-2014, he was the chair of the CRC Space-Time-Matter, bringing together colleagues from HU Berlin, FU Berlin, Universität Potsdam, and the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics in Golm. He was very active internationally, holding visiting positions at IHES, at the IAS in Princeton, at the Université Paris-Sud, at the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in Bonn, at the Fields Institute in Toronto, at MIT, at University Nagoya, and Tohoku University, among others.

From 1999-2013, Jochen Brüning was the founding director of the Hermann von Helmholtz-Zentrum für Kulturtechnik (HZK) at HU Berlin, a central institute pursuing project-related multidisciplinary research and interdisciplinary teaching. His interdisciplinary skills, his feeling for the relevance of university collections, and his interest in collecting as a cultural technique form the fundamental foundation for the orientation of the HZK to this day. Under his leadership, standards were set for exhibitions, scientific communication, and dialogue with society, like the Helmholtz lectures he initiated, which were to become a crowd magnet.

Jochen Brüning was genuinely enthusiastic by nature, and this enthusiasm was infectious for those around him. He knew how to encourage people and remained an inspiration for new projects and ideas up until his death. With Jochen Brüning, we have lost not only an outstanding mathematician and exceptional teacher but also a bridge builder between disciplines, a scientist with strategic vision, and an enthusiastic promoter of dialogue between science and society. We will remember him with gratitude and deep appreciation.

Full obituary from Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin (in German)