“It goes without saying that we are delighted at this fantastic news from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. This is the seventh time we have been awarded a Humboldt Professorship,” said Rector Professor Eva Inés Obergfell in an initial reaction. “With our Faculty of Mathematics and Computer Science and our research partners, especially the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in the Sciences, we can offer Professor Král an excellent environment for his work.” His expertise in big data is “an excellent complement to the AI expertise of Sayan Mukherjee,” who was awarded an Alexander von Humboldt Professorship for Artificial Intelligence two years ago.
Professor Bernd Kirchheim, Dean of the Faculty of Mathematics and Computer Science, is confident that this will provide a major boost for mathematics in Leipzig: “Professor Král bridges the gap between pure mathematics and developments beyond current artificial intelligence.” He is interested in optimisation processes in complex organisational structures. “Data is now being created much faster than the necessary computing power is growing, so the important content needs to be filtered out. To do this, you need to create combinations of data and develop the means to effectively describe what can be enormous variants of them.” He believes Král has the necessary expertise for this – and that he could create synergies in the teaching of maths and computer science.
About Daniel Král
Daniel Král studied mathematics and computer science at Charles University in Prague, where he also obtained his doctorate. He was a postdoctoral fellow at the TU Berlin and the Georgia Institute of Technology. In 2012, he was appointed Professor of Mathematics and Computer Science at the University of Warwick (UK), before moving to Brno in 2018. The European Research Council first awarded him two prestigious and well-funded grants: an ERC Starting Grant and then an ERC Consolidator Grant. Král has also won several international mathematics prizes.
Alexander von Humboldt Professorship
The Humboldt Professorship is Germany’s most prestigious international research prize and also the country’s most valuable prize aimed at researchers from abroad. The Alexander von Humboldt Foundation employs a rigorous selection process to award it. Its aim is to enable German universities to appoint world-leading researchers who are based abroad and to offer them internationally competitive conditions for pioneering research. The prize money of up to five million euros is intended to finance the first five years in Germany.