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Dierk Schleicher

Dierk Schleicher

Dierk Schleicher is professor of mathematics at Jacobs University Bremen. He obtained his PhD at Cornell University, NY, and held visiting positions in Berkeley, Stony Brook, Paris, Toronto, and München. His main research interests are in Dynamical Systems and Chaos, especially in Holomorphic Dynamics and the Mandelbrot set, and the dynamics of Newton's root-finding method. He was one of the main organizers of the 50th International Mathematical Olympiad (IMO) 2009 in Bremen.

 

"On Newton's root-finding method and the Mandelbrot set - or: on Useless and Useful Mathematics": We will discuss one area of mathematics that he finds beautiful and intriguing, and on which he likes working, no matter whether or not it has any practical applications: these are dynamical systems that arise by iterating polynomials. Then he discusses another area that seems unrelated but that seems to have much more practical relevance: finding zeroes of analytic equations or polynomials. At the end it turns out that on order to make progress on the "useful" questions, one needs to know everything about the "useless" (but interesting and beautiful) questions. Which is one more example why the distinction of research into "useless" and "useful" is - "useless"!