29 September 2022
|
Story Engela Duvenage
|
Photo Engela Duvenage
Dr Christian Budde revelled in the opportunity to participate in the ninth Heidelberg Laureate Forum in Germany, which saw 200 invited young computer scientists and mathematicians converge on the university town of Heidelberg. Dr Budde was one of 200 young researchers from more than 50 countries worldwide who were selected to attend the week-long HLF event, held at the end of September 2022.
University of the Free State (UFS) mathematician
Dr Christian Budde firmly believes in the value of networking and making meaningful connections. That is why he revelled in the opportunity to participate in the ninth
Heidelberg Laureate Forum in Germany, which saw 200 invited young computer scientists and mathematicians converge on the university town of Heidelberg. There, Dr Budde and others had ample opportunity to interact with 25 laureates of the world’s most imminent prizes in maths and computer science, as well as leading figures in academia and industry, such as Google and IBM.
Being among the best of the best
“It’s been wonderful to meet some of the best minds,” he says appreciatively.
Among the laureates were mathematicians such as Gerd Falting (Fields medallist 1986 who proved the Mordell conjecture by using methods of arithmetic algebraic geometry) and Avi Wigderson (Abel Prize 2021, for providing the mathematical foundations of computer science). On the side of computer scientists, the likes of Vint Cerf, one of the ‘fathers of the Internet’, Whitfield Diffie, co-developer of the public-key cryptography, and Dr Leslie Lamport, developer of the LaTeX document preparation system, were present.
Dr Budde was one of 200 young researchers from more than 50 countries worldwide who were selected to attend the week-long HLF event, held at the end of September 2022. On average, 900 applications are received annually for this meaningful and fun-filled event. Between workshops, panel discussions, and guest lectures, the HLF programme also allowed ample time for informal discussions during events such as a Bavarian evening, a visit to the Heidelberg Castle and boat trip on the picturesque Neckar River.
International collaborations
Dr Budde, who joined the UFS
Faculty of Natural and Agricultural Sciences in January 2022, felt quite at home in Heidelberg, as he was born some 380 kilometres away in the Goch region and spent his childhood in Kleve in the Lower Rhine region. He received his PhD magna cum laude in 2019 from the Bergische Universität Wuppertal in Germany, after completing an MSc in Mathematics cum laude at Radboud University Nijmegen in the Netherlands.
He enjoys being part of joint studies and working with others on ideas. In the process, he has completed several research stays at institutions in South Africa and internationally.
“My research concentrates on evolution equations, operator semigroups, and networks as part of functional analysis,” he explains.
“I am particularly interested in the well-posedness of abstract Cauchy problems, extrapolation spaces, and perturbation theory of operator semigroups, and especially non-strongly continuous operator semigroups.”
His research proposal on
Perturbation Methods for Abstract Cauchy Problems associated to Evolution Equations was recently funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) within the Walter Benjamin Programme, and he was hosted by Prof Jacek Banasiak at the University of Pretoria.
In 2022, South Africa’s
National Research Foundation awarded an Innovation and Freestanding Postdoctoral Fellowship to him for a project on ‘Well-posedness and perturbations of (non-)autonomous evolution equations’.
Promoting mathematics at the UFS
Although Dr Budde only joined the UFS
Department of Mathematics and Applied Mathematics at the beginning of 2022, he has already found his feet in academia in South Africa. He did so while completing a postdoctoral position in the School of Mathematical and Statistical Sciences at the North-West University between 2019 and 2021.
He is already a member of the
South African Mathematical Society (SAMS) and also of the professional body South African Council for Natural Scientific Professions (SACNASP). In this regard, he has thrown his weight behind interactions within the South African mathematics community, where he is co-organising a special session on functional analysis and operator theory at the 65th SAMS conference in Stellenbosch in December 2022.
On an international level, he has helped to organise various virtual presentations over the past year – from one on C*-algebras and dynamics within the framework of the 24th Internet seminar, to a special session on linear systems for the 2021 International Workshop on Operator Theory and its Applications (IWOTA 2021) and a mini-symposium on Evolution Equations and Operator Semigroups at the eighth ECM of the European Mathematical Society. He has reviewed papers for the searchable database of the American Mathematical Society, MathSciNet, and other international accredited peer-review journals.
His teaching philosophy revolves around challenging his students as far as possible, so that they are able to gain insights and knowledge in abstract theory, to and become involved in developing their own concepts.
“To be a competitive mathematics student is about more than just being able to follow recipes on how to do calculations.”
Lessons for young researchers
Dr Budde’s life lesson to other younger researchers aspiring to develop their career in the sciences can be summed up in three words: “Network, network, network.”
“And keeping contact is also an important part of networking,” he adds.
He also believes in seizing opportunities as they come along. Therefore, he feels that activities such as hosting seminar sessions and attending conferences are an important part of building one’s career.
Dr Budde also believes in creating new opportunities.
“As my father always says, you already have a ‘no’ if you haven’t asked.”
* The Heidelberg Laureate Forum mirrors the Lindau Nobel Laureate Meetings, which annually provide young researchers with the chance of engaging with Nobel laureates. Nobel awards are not presented for computer science or mathematics. Since 2013, the HLF has therefore given young mathematicians and computer scientists the opportunity to interact and learn from laureates in their fields, all of whom have been winners of the most prestigious prizes such as the ACM Prize in Computing, the ACM AM Turing Award, the Fields Medal, the Abel Prize, and the Nevanlinna Prize.
The 2022 edition was the first in-person event since the COVID-19 pandemic, as virtual events were held in 2020 and 2021. It is sponsored by the Klaus Tschira Foundation.