Einstein Center – Topic Development Lab

Mathematics is not a static field of knowledge, but rather a multifaceted, dynamic, and expanding discipline, in which areas seemingly far from applications suddenly become indispensable and applications stimulate challenging foundational mathematical research. Moreover, many application-driven mathematical developments are also motivated and triggered by developments in other scientific and humanities fields.

 

The research agenda for MATH+ has not been fixed in advance for several years, but is designed to be dynamic. New fields and opportunities emerge over time, or need to be actively developed. The Topic Development Lab (TDL) is a central part of MATH+ that, based on this dynamic view of mathematics, provides a platform for developing new topics, for building bridges between different fields of mathematics (e.g., between “pure” and “applied”), and for reaching out to other areas of science and potential cooperation partners outside of mathematics. The main activity of the TDL consists of Thematic Einstein Semesters funded by the Einstein Foundation Berlin.

 

The current Thematic Einstein Semester (Winter 2023/24):

 

Small Data Analysis

 

This Thematic Einstein Semester aims to intensify the collaboration between mathematicians and researchers from other disciplines who develop research methods for small data sets. Such data sets are common when the events of interest are hard to observe such as certain diseases, meteorological phenomena, or (pre-)historic findings.

We will investigate how expert knowledge can be integrated at all stages of the data-analytical pipeline ranging from the digitization of research objects, the processing and analysis thereof, up to the interpretation of mathematical results.