Issue 3 | 2023

12. September 2023

This summer, we celebrated a special event: the first onsite meeting with our alumni in four years, intertwined with a “Math Colloquium” in honor of our former group leader Anna Wienhard, who is now Director at the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in the Sciences in Leipzig. She was presented with the award of a “HITS Fellow”, the highest distinction of the Institute.

With gravitational wave detectors astrophysicists can make the sound audible that two black holes make when they merge. So far, about 70 such sounds, so-called chirps, have been recorded. HITS researchers from the “Stellar Evolution Theory” group predict that in this ocean of voices, chirps occur preferentially in two specific frequency ranges. Their theses were published in the scientific journal “The Astrophysical Journal Letters.”

In the “Beyond the Limits” section, we introduce the Ukrainian-American chemist Olexandr Isayev (Carnegie Mellon University), one of two “Klaus Tschira Guest Professors” this year.

About HITS

HITS, the Heidelberg Institute for Theoretical Studies, was established in 2010 by physicist and SAP co-founder Klaus Tschira (1940-2015) and the Klaus Tschira Foundation as a private, non-profit research institute. HITS conducts basic research in the natural, mathematical, and computer sciences. Major research directions include complex simulations across scales, making sense of data, and enabling science via computational research. Application areas range from molecular biology to astrophysics. An essential characteristic of the Institute is interdisciplinarity, implemented in numerous cross-group and cross-disciplinary projects. The base funding of HITS is provided by the Klaus Tschira Foundation.

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