We discuss certain open problems in the context of arrangements of lines in the plane.

[also available in German] The Colombian government sprays coca fields with herbicides in an effort to reduce drug production. Spray drifts at the Ecuador-Colombia border became an international issue. We developed a ...

This is a snapshot about operator theory and one of its fundamental tools: the singular value decomposition (SVD). The SVD breaks up linear transformations into simpler mappings, thus unveiling their geometric properties. ...

[also available in German] Leonhard Euler (1707–1783) – one of the greatest mathematicians of the eighteenth century and of all times – often corresponded with a friend of his, Christian Goldbach (1690–1764), an amateur ...

Platonic solids, Felix Klein, H.S.M. Coxeter and a flap of a swallowtail: The five Platonic solids tetrahedron, cube, octahedron, icosahedron and dodecahedron have always attracted much curiosity from mathematicians, not ...

A friend of mine, an expert in statistical genomics, told me the following story: At a dinner party, an attractive lady asked him, "What do you do for a living?" He replied, "I model." As my friend is a handsome man, the ...

This Snapshot is about the generalization of ">" from ordinary numbers to so-called fields. At the end, I will touch on some ideas in recent research.

Mathematicians are very interested in prime numbers. In this snapshot, we will discuss some problems concerning the distribution of primes and introduce some special infinite series in order to study them.

Im Folgenden soll ein kurzer Abriss des Themas Matrixfaktorisierungen gegeben werden. Wir werden darlegen, warum dieses recht simple Konzept zu erstaunlich tiefen mathematischen Gedankengängen führt und auch in der modernen ...

In quantum mechanics, unlike in classical mechanics, one cannot make precise predictions about how a system will behave. Instead, one is concerned with mere probabilities. Consequently, it is a very important task to ...