New Hausdorff Chair: Ana Caraiani

Bonn, 22.02.2022. Ana Caraiani has accepted our call for a Hausdorff Chair and will take up her position in September. Since the Hausdorff Center was founded, these additional W3 professorships have been filled with outstanding international scientists on a candidate-driven basis. The 37-year-old Romanian is the first woman in this position and complements the circle of excellent mathematicians around Massimiliano Gubinelli, Stefan Müller, Sven Rady, Peter Scholze, and Christoph Thiele.

Langlands program - close cooperation with Peter Scholze

Ana Caraiani has already got close ties to Bonn: In 2016 she became a Bonn Junior Fellow. In 2017, she moved to Imperial College London as a Royal Society Research Fellow and Lecturer and has been associated with us as a Bonn Research Fellow ever since. Since 2021, Ana Caraiani has been a full professor at Imperial College London. Ana Caraiani works at the interface between the Langlands program and arithmetic geometry. In recent years, she has co-authored many of her papers with Peter Scholze who is very happy about his new colleague in Bonn: "With Ana Caraiani, a world-leading scientist in arithmetic geometry comes to Bonn. We have already worked together a lot in the past, on questions in the Langlands program and especially on the cohomology of Shimura varieties. I'm very much looking forward to continuing this work, and especially to organizing seminars and other events together," says Peter Scholze.

Enthusiastic about fostering the next generation

In 2018, Ana Caraiani was one of the winners of the Whitehead Prize of the London Mathematical Society. In 2020, she was elected a Fellow of the American Mathematical Society and was awarded the 2020 EMS Prize. Ana Caraiani is one of the organizers of the trimester program "The Arithmetic of the Langlands Program" to be held at the Hausdorff Research Institute for Mathematics (HIM) in the summer of 2023. She is enthusiastic about fostering the next generation and organizes, together with Jessica Fintzen, a conference Community-building in the Langlands Program (CLAP) prior to this trimester program. In this CLAP conference, early career researchers, in particular those from groups that are underrepresented in mathematics, and those who have been particularly affected by the pandemic, are encouraged to apply.

Exceptional environment at Bonn

Speaking of Jessica Fintzen: The fact that her colleague has also accepted a call to Bonn was one of the reasons for Ana Caraiani to come to Bonn. "I was really excited that Jessica Fintzen was recruited to come to Bonn around the same time as me, this played an important part in my decision." But of course, the excellent reputation of Bonn mathematics and its students attracted her as well, as Ana Caraiani emphasizes:"Bonn is one of the best places in the world to do arithmetic geometry and I am particularly excited by the chance to be colleagues with Peter Scholze, who has already had such a great impact on pure mathematics. In addition, I think the students in Bonn (from Bachelor’s all the way to PhD) are extremely strong and I look forward to interacting with them. My three current PhD students have all been Master’s students in Bonn and I think they all look forward to coming back to this exceptional environment."

The fact that she is the first female Hausdorff Chair does not impress her too much:"To some extent, I feel that it doesn’t matter so much who is the first, but rather what matters is to create the right environment and opportunities so that there can be many more to come.“

Please find a detailed interview with Ana Caraiani about her life and work in the Quanta magazine.