Nicolas Monod gives 2016 Gauss Lecture

The Gauss Lectures (Gauß-Vorlesung) are given each year in honor of Carl Friedrich Gauss. Established in 2001, they are targeted to a broad audience and are paired with another lecture on the history of mathematics. The lecturers are selected by the German Mathematical Society, and are mathematicians who have distinguished themselves in the field.

This year, the distinction has been awarded to Professor Nicolas Monod, who holds the Chair of ergodic and geometric group theory at EPFL. He is also Director of the Bernoulli Center, president of the Swiss Mathematical Society, and a Fellow of the American Mathematical Society. His research focuses on the interplay between different areas of Mathematics, and specifically ergodic and geometric methods in group theory.

Professor Monod gave the Gauss lecture on 20 May 2016 at TU Dresden. The title of his talk was “100 Jahre Zweisamkeit – The Banach–Tarski Paradox”.

From the event flyer:

“A hundred years ago, mathematicians discovered an incredible magic trick. You can duplicate any object by cutting it carefully into pieces and re-assembling the fragments to get two identical copies of the original, in real size. Why don’t we do it at home with a piece of bread, fish… or gold? To understand the secrets of this duplication, we will have to change our way of thinking about size, or rather about volume and mass. Today, mathematicians still discover new ways to move the pieces around and play new tricks.”