January 31, 2025

Memoirs of the AMS "Cataland: Why the Fuß?"
In collaboration with Hugh Thomas and Nathan Williams, Christian published the monograph Cataland: Why the Fuß? in the Memoirs of the AMS.

We first stared to work on this topic at the AIM workshop Rational Catalan combinatorics in 2012, and published a first version on the arXiv in 2015. The manuscript was then finalized in 2018 at an MFO Research in Pairs and promptly submitted to the Memoirs of the AMS, where it was accepted for publication in 2020. It then took another 4.5 years to finally publish the monograph, among which 2.5 years were needed for proper typesetting.

Look into the book to find out why the typesetting was not that easy!

January 24, 2025

Humanity's Last Exam
Christian contributed several questions to Humanity's Last Exam, one of which was selected among the 550 top-rated questions.

According to Heise Online, 70.000 questions were submitted, among which 3000 questions made it into the final dataset of questions from all scientific disciplines.

Beside a prize money of $500, the authors of the top-rated 550 questions are included as co-authors of the publication. As of today, no state-of-the-art LLM model is able to solve even 10% of the questions present in the dataset, the New York Times writes When A.I. Passes This Test, Look Out.

The only other contributor from RUB is Prof. Alexander Ivanov, congratulations!

January 15, 2025

Algebra who-is-who
All five RUB Algebra groups met for a get-together! Everyone provided some research keywords!

December 1, 2024

JProf:in Marie Brandenburg
It is our honor to announce that Marie Brandenburg was assigned the Juniorprofessorship "Combinatorics" by the Rector of the RUB, Prof. Dr. Dr. h. c. Martin Paul, with the Dean of the Faculty of Mathematics, Prof. Dr. Gerd Laures, present. [details]

September 25, 2024

FUN PROJECT: Opening analysis Chess960
Together with Galen Dorpalen-Barry, we identify optimal openings for all Chess960 variants by analyzing about 20 million Stockfish 16 games. We formally define "opening", rediscover classical openings (e.g., Queen's Gambit, Sicilian Defense, Ruy Lopez) for standard chess, and identify novel openings for all other variants. [more details]

September 23, 2024

Spanish-German research project approved
The German DFG and the Spanish AEI approved our joint project Combinatorial Polytope Theory with two PhD positions (one with me and one with my co-PI Raman Sanyal, Frankfurt) and one PostDoc position with our co-PIs Arnau Padrol and Vincent Pilaud (Barcelona). The project is about the "combinatorics of polytope theory" in discrete geometry and geometric combinatorics on the one hand, and the "concrete theory of special combinatorial polytopes" in algebraic combinatorics on the other hand.

September 23, 2024

New PhD Position "Machine Learning Methods in Algebraic Combinatorics"
We offer a PhD position in our DFG project "Machine Learning Combinatorial Statistics and Maps" as part of our research team. The application deadline is October 15. [more details]

Feel free to contact me directly via email if you have questions!

September 13, 2024

Marie Brandenburg has accepted our offer for a W1 junior professorship
Coming from KTH Stockholm, Sweden, she will join the coordination team for the DFG priority program "Combinatorial Synergies" in December as part of the research team. [Marie's website]

We are very much looking forward to having her on board.

July 26, 2024

Nupur Jain has accepted our offer for a PhD position
Coming from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur, she will join our DFG project "Machine Learning Combinatorial Statistics and Maps" in October as part of our research team.

We are very much looking forward to having her on board.

July 26, 2024

FPSAC 2024 @ RUB
Wow! The 36th International Conference on Formal Power Series and Algebraic Combinatorics took place in Bochum from July 22-26, with 282 participants from 32 countries, 10 invited talks, 27 contributed talks, and 80 posters.

What an intense week! [read more]