Exhibitions

from November 18, 2019 to January 31, 2020

Emil Julius Gumbel united mathematical excellence and social courage. As a world-renowned mathematician, he laid the foundations of extreme value statistics. At the same time, he campaigned in the "German League for Human Rights" (Deutsche Liga für Menschenrechte) against the glorification of war and the emerging Nazi movement. The University of Heidelberg, where he had been a professor since 1923, withdrew his teaching license in 1932. In 1933 he was deprived of his German citizenship. It was not until the early 1990s that Heidelberg University acknowledged and rehabilitated Gumbel with an Academic Memorial Ceremony. The exhibition uses historical documents to show important milestones and companions in Gumbel's life.

The exhibition was organized by Matthias Scherer, Lexuri Fernández, Isabella Wiegand (Technical University of Munich) and Werner Frese (University of Hagen) and accompanied by the renowned science historian Annette Vogt (Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin).

from February, 26 2019 to May 31, 2019

This touring exhibition, which had its starting point at the 7th European Mathematics Congress in Berlin in July 2016, portrays thirteen female mathematicians sharing their experiences, thus showing them as role models for young female scientists and highlighting the human aspects of mathematics production. This makes the discipline more tangible and accessible to outsiders or newcomers.

The exhibition and the catalog (published by Verlag am Fluss) are the result of the joint work of photographer Noel Tovia Matoff and the four mathematicians Sylvie Paycha, Sara Azzali, Alexandra Antoniouk, and Magdalena Georgescu, with contributions from Maria Hoffmann-Dartevelle (German translation), Sara Munday (proofreading) and the two graphic designers Wenke Neunast/eckedesign (exhibition) and Gesine Krüger (catalog).

from May 13, 2016 to June 12, 2016

The working lives and activities of Jewish scientists in Germany are being explored at nine sites and within a time frame ranging from the legal and political emancipation of Jewish citizens in the 19th century to their persecution and expulsion under the Nazi regime. In doing so, the exhibition shows the extensive and significant contribution of Jewish researchers in the German Empire and the Republic of Weimar to mathematics and its culture in the German-speaking world. It also shows the high price paid by the Nazi government for the expulsion of Jews from Germany and commemorates their flight, emigration and murder after 1933.

The exhibition was organized by Prof. Dr. Moritz Epple, the scientific director of the exhibition project and head of the "History of Science" working group at the University of Frankfurt am Main, Germany, in collaboration with a group of seven historians of mathematics. It was the first exhibition at the MATHEMATIKON and was sponsored by the Klaus Tschira Foundation and backed by the Springer Verlag with a comprehensive publication.