Thursday, 17 September 2026, marks the 200th anniversary of Bernhard Riemann’s birth, one of the most influential mathematicians in history. Bernhard Riemann was born in the Kingdom of Hannover and attended school in Hannover. To mark the occasion, the German Mathematical Society and the Riemann Center for Geometry and Physics at Leibniz University Hannover (LUH) invite members of the public with an interest in mathematics to attend the Gauss Lecture.
The programme begins at 4.30 pm in the Lichthof, the atrium of the main university building at Welfengarten 1. Admission begins at 4 pm. The programme features two lectures offering engaging insights into Bernhard Riemann’s fundamental contributions to mathematics and their lasting influence.
Attendance is free of charge, but registration is required: https://konferenz.uni-hannover.de/event/217/registrations/199/
Introductory lecture: Crazy Calculations with Riemann
The introductory lecture in German will be delivered by Prof. Dr. Burkard Polster on “Crazy Calculations with Riemann”, exploring mathematical rules that may seem immutable, yet can give rise to new and surprisingly powerful ideas when taken beyond the limits of their validity. Burkard Polster is a mathematician at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia. He is widely known as the creator and presenter of the popular YouTube channel “Mathologer”, which explores advanced mathematical ideas in an accessible and engaging way. Polster’s research spans geometry, recreational mathematics and the mathematics of everyday life – from tying shoelaces to stabilising wobbly tables.
About the lecture: At school, we learn mathematical rules that seem unbreakable: you cannot divide by zero, you cannot take the square root of a negative number, and when adding numbers, the order makes no difference. In higher mathematics, however, we find that such rules often apply only within a particular framework. When we move beyond this framework, new and surprisingly powerful ideas emerge. A particularly striking example is the Riemann Rearrangement Theorem: for certain infinite series, simply changing the order of their terms can completely change the value of the sum. In his introductory lecture, Burkard Polster explains how this is possible, why infinite series behave so differently from finite ones and what surprising conclusions Riemann drew from this.
Gauss Lecture: The Music of the Primes
The Gauss Lecture, delivered in English by Prof. Dr. Marcus du Sautoy, is entitled “The Music of the Primes” and explores the surprising connections between mathematics and music that emerge in the context of the famous Riemann Hypothesis. Marcus du Sautoy is the Simonyi Professor for the Public Understanding of Science and professor of mathematics at the University of Oxford, as well as a fellow of the Royal Society. He is the author of nine books. His first book, “The Music of the Primes", won prizes in Italy and Germany as the best popular science book of the year. Du Sautoy is also the author of two plays and has presented numerous radio and television programmes, including the four-part BBC television series “The Story of Maths”.
About the lecture: Prime numbers – numbers that can only be divided by themselves and 1 – are the building blocks of mathematics, the hydrogen and oxygen of the world of numbers. Simple to define, yet their behaviour remains a mystery. Although they appear to be very random on the surface, Bernhard Riemann discovered a hidden music in 1859 that seems to control the distribution of these numbers. He suggested that the frequencies he had discovered followed a pattern. However, his conjecture remains unproven to this day. The Riemann Hypothesis is the greatest unsolved problem in mathematics. Marcus du Sautoy will take the audience on a journey to explore the challenge at the heart of this problem.
Further Information about the event:
https://konferenz.uni-hannover.de/event/217/
Note to editors:
For further information, please contact Prof. Dr. Jonathan Bowden, Institute of Differential Geometry (tel. 0511 762-12471, email: jonathan.bowden@math.uni-hannover.de).
