T.A. Springer Visiting Professorship

In 2024, the Utrecht Geometry Centre established an annual visiting professorship, named after T.A. Springer (1926 – 2011), who served as professor of mathematics at Utrecht University from 1959 to 1991. Professor Springer is well-known for his work in algebraic groups, Hecke algebras and complex reflection groups. He introduced two important notions in representation theory which became subsequently known as the Springer representation and the Springer resolution.

The aim of the visiting professorship is to stimulate influx of new mathematical ideas into the UGC community. Occupants of the chair are selected for their distinguished roles in contributing to new developments in international mathematical research, in areas of interest to the UGC community. Chair holders typically work at our institute for a period of one month, and are expected to contribute to the scientific activities of the UGC by interacting with its members through seminars, mini-courses, or other forms of collaboration.

2024/25 Springer Chair

The 2024-2025 Chair was shared by Prof. Gavril Farkas (Humboldt University) and Prof. András Vasy (Stanford University).

Prof. Farkas is the Director of the Mathematical Institute at Humboldt University in Berlin. He is well-known for his work in algebraic geometry, with connections to other fields such as topology, group theory, and combinatorics. Apart from Farkas’s research focus on the geometry and topology of various moduli spaces, he is also interested in enumerative geometry, syzygies of algebraic varieties and their commutative algebra aspects, vector bundles on curves, abelian varieties and theta functions, Prym varieties, K3 surfaces, and Brill-Noether type problems.

Prof. Vasy is the Robert Grimmett Professor in Mathematics at Stanford University. He is one of the most prominent researchers in partial differential equations worldwide: he is a leading expert in microlocal and semi-classical analysis and in scattering theory, and he has made groundbreaking contributions to General Relativity and to geometric inverse problems. Among other distinctions, he was an invited speaker at the 2014 ICM, as well as the recipient of the 2017 Bochner prize.