Wolfgang Lück's main research field is topology. This deals with abstract structures and properties of spaces that are preserved under deformation, so-called topological invariants. Such invariants are important factors in the classification of topological spaces. In particular, Wolfgang Lück researches invariants of closed manifolds, special geometric objects that look the same locally but can be different globally. In his pioneering research, Wolfgang Lück proved, among other things, the Lück approximation theorem named after him and special cases of the famous Farrell-Jones conjecture.
About the prize winner
Wolfgang Lück studied mathematics in Göttingen, where he graduated in 1981 and received his PhD in 1984. From 1982 he was a research assistant and from 1985 an assistant professor in Göttingen, where he qualified as a professor in 1989. In the academic year 1990/91 he went to the University of Kentucky in Lexington as associate professor. From 1991 to 1996 he was a full professor at the University of Mainz, and from 1996 to 2010 he worked at the University of Münster, where he was spokesperson for the Collaborative Research Center “Geometry, Groups & Actions”. Wolfgang Lück has been working at the University of Bonn since October 2010 and was director of the Hausdorff Research Institute for Mathematics (HIM), which is part of the Bonn Cluster of Excellence Hausdorff Center for Mathematics (HCM), from 2011 to 2017. In 2012, he was appointed Max Planck Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics (MPIM) in Bonn. From October 2019 to September 2022, he was HCM spokesperson. Numerous prestigious prizes were awarded him throughout his scientific career: he received the Max Planck Research Prize in 2003, the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize in 2008 and an ERC Advanced Grant in 2015. In 2008 he was an Invited Speaker at the European Congress of Mathematicians (ECM) and in 2010 at the International Congress of Mathematicians (ICM). In 2010, Lück was elected a member of the German Academy of Sciences Leopoldina - National Academy of Sciences and in 2013 to the North Rhine-Westphalian Academy of Sciences, Humanities and the Arts.
About the prize
The Karl Georg Christian von Staudt Prize is presented every three to six years by the Otto and Edith Haupt Foundation. The prize is awarded to one or more mathematicians working at a German university or research institution, unless the stay is temporary. The prize honors “outstanding, pioneering and published research results in the field of theoretical mathematics” and is endowed with 25,000 euros. Of the nine previous prizewinners, six - Stefan Hildebrandt, Don Zagier, Günter Harder, Gerd Faltings, Michael Rapoport and now Wolfgang Lück - have a very close connection to the University of Bonn and have taught and researched in Bonn for several decades.