Frontiers of Science Awards 2025Award for two mathematicians from the University of Hamburg

14 July 2025

Photo: UHH/Leon Goertz

Dr. Mathias Schacht (left) and Dr. Paul Wedrich (right)

Yesterday, the International Congress of Basic Science (ICBS) in Beijing presented Professors Mathias Schacht and Paul Wedrich with the prestigious Frontiers of Science Award. The scientists from the Department of Mathematics of the Faculty of Mathematics, Informatics and Natural Sciences at the University of Hamburg were honored for their outstanding contributions to fundamental mathematical research.

Prof. Dr. Mathias Schacht received the Frontiers of Science Award in the field of combinatorics for his publication “Extremal results for random discrete structures”, which was published in the Annals of Mathematics in 2016. His research deals with extremal principles in random discrete structures, in particular in graph theory and combinatorics. The publication sheds light on the structural properties of randomly generated discrete objects with high probability and how they behave in comparison to deterministic models.

Prof. Dr. Paul Wedrich was awarded the Frontiers of Science Award for the publication “Invariants of 4-manifolds from Khovanov-Rozansky homology” in the Algebraic and Geometric Topology section together with his co-authors Scott Morrison and Kevin Walker. The publication appeared in the journal Geometry & Topology in 2022 and provides new mathematical tools for the study of four-dimensional manifolds using Khovanov-Rozansky homology. These methods are of central importance for current research in the Collaborative Research Center 1624 “Higher Structures, Moduli Spaces and Integrability” and the Cluster of Excellence “Quantum Universe” at the University of Hamburg.

With the Frontiers of Science Awards, the International Congress of Basic Science has been honoring outstanding scientific contributions to basic research in over 40 fields of mathematics, theoretical physics and computer science every year since 2023.