Curvy Mathematics

Karl Schmedders

Tribute to Karl Schmedders

 Chocolate, cheese, neutrality and financial institutions is what Switzerland is known for to most people. Located in the middle of the European continent, the country provides 1/3 of housing to the CERN Collider and 3/3 of housing to the University of Zurich, which had been the alma mater of Albert Einstein and Karl Young. These days, another "Karl" is teaching at the Department of Business Administration. Karl Schmedders gladly shares his passion for probability theory and he is definitely going to inspire you to dig deeper into this section of mathematics whether you are fond of mathematics or not.

 Mathematics captured his attention during school years and a lifetime relationship has been developed since then. Being afraid to dive into pure mathematics, he has thankfully turned himself to the applied side of mathematics by studying business engineering at the University of Karlsruhe. It was during his studies that he discovered his true love, operations research and he has been occupying himself with it ever since.

 Insisting and persisting has always been his best shot against difficulties. On the one hand, there was his unfinished task of writing his PhD thesis, on the other hand, there was the lack of social life. On the verge of abandoning his duty, he continued with his work, even if this was "an incredibly lonely, frustrating and often "depressing experience". Although publishing some work alone would produce greater acknowledgement from his colleagues, he clearly states that assistance is helpful, even if this would cause to be looked down upon by his colleagues.

 Even though he is not fond of networking in order to promote one's work, he accepts the valid fact that it is inevitable. Marketing and promoting oneself, both unfortunately exist in the world of natural science too. There are many scientists researching the unknown, an activity which can easily be overlooked. This could dishearten the scientist and would definitely result in a drawback for humanity.

 Regarding compensation and recognition, academic (aka useless) research is not a good option if one is pursuing wealth and fame whereas applied scientific research provides higher odds to acquire the above. Still there are scientists who dare to follow the path of knowledge in order to comprehend the way our world is turning even if the compensation for their time spent studying is not proper.

 He believes that daily lives take so much time and energy out of peoples' lives that they have neither the time nor the energy to learn new things "just for fun" after having entered their adulthood. Our chance to turn people's attention to mathematics is to "convince" somehow the children to become engineers or scientists. Humanity has always needed them.

 If only he could turn back time, he would not have chosen the same path of studies. It is way "too applied" for his standards, he would prefer something more abstract with a background enriched with mathematics and statistics. Young students would probably find it beneficial to study mathematics, statistics and computer science since it is very interesting to explore our universe by processing our given data. This could result in financial benefits too apart from already being extremely intriguing.

Moderator: Gauss, Overseers.