In Interviews, News

The Heidelberg Laureate Forum is an annual meeting bringing together winners of the most prestigious scientific awards in Mathematics (Abel Prize, Fields Medal and Nevanlinna Prize) and Computer Science (ACM Turing Award) with a select group of highly talented young researchers. Roughly 200 young scientists from all over the world get the unique opportunity to interact with their scholarly role models during lectures, panels and discussions. At the same time, the up and coming scientists can engage in inspiring and motivating conversations with the laureates during various social events. The Heidelberg Laureate Forum provides a platform for scientific dialogue across generations.

Each year AMSI and AustMS provide funding for young Australian researchers to attend.

John Tsartsaflis 
La Trobe University

Where are you in your career? I’m a PhD student.

Why do you want to attend the HLF? To meet all these great minds and have the opportunity to interact with them.

Tell us about your research. My research is on cohomology of nilpotent Lie algebras over a field of characteristic 2. In more details, I study filiform Lie algebras and so far our results are indicating that these algebras are special; they don’t obey the same rules as they counterparts over a field ofcharacteristic zero.

What are your favourite applications of your work? It’s pure mathematics! No applications here, thanks.

If you could meet any Fields Medalist or Abel Prize winner which would it be and why?

I would love to meet Maryam Mirzakhani, she seems to be very dedicated and she has done incredible things in Geometry! Not that I really understand her work, but I know that it has tremendous impact.