Group shot of the workshop participants. ©Katrin Boes / MPI-CBG
The math community at the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics (MPI-CBG) in Dresden, Germany, including Türkü Özlüm Çelik and Silviana Amethyst, and colleagues from Osnabrück Viktoriia Borovik, Paul Breiding, and Sarah Eggleston, organized an international workshop from February 3-6, 2025, bringing together over 60 scientists.
The workshop, Numerical Nonlinear Algebra in the Real World, featured a broad array of topics through biology, chemistry, and physics with a focus on nonlinear modeling problems and techniques. The talks included local speakers on Active Matter Hydrodynamics (Frank Jülicher, MPI for the Physics of Complex Systems, MPIPKS), Stories of Ecologies (Pierre Haas, MPIPKS and MPI-CBG), and Mathematical Machine Learning (Jiayi Li, MPI-CBG). External presenters included Fast and Flexible Modeling of Chemical Reaction Networks (Torkel Loman, University of Cambridge) and Equilibria in Game Theory (Irem Portakal, MPI for Mathematics in the Sciences).
The communication spaces in MPI-CBG and the Center for Systems Biology Dresden (CSBD) fostered collaborations between early-career PhD students and researchers and faculty, spanning polynomial optimization, tropical geometry, and homotopy continuation. The whiteboards in the atrium facilitated open discussions and new research projects. This open and inclusive environment also allowed us to display mathematical art, for example, a 3D-printed interactive Barth Sextic created by Silviana Amethyst. Conversations continued online through video profiles and vignettes of the talks posted by Anna Frangou on the Math in Science Bluesky account (@math-mpicbg.bsky.social), which spurred engagement with the wider scientific community.
“The workshop was a real pleasure,” said Aida Maraj, a new mathematics group leader here at the CSBD. “It’s always inspiring to meet new collaborators as well as continue older conversations. And it’s wonderful to see so many people contributing to our mission of bringing disciplines together.”
The hub of mathematics at the MPI-CBG is rapidly growing. The research groups colocated at the CSBD plan to host many more research events in the future (workshops, schools, etc.) to close the gap between mathematics, computation, physics, and biology.
3D-printed interactive Barth Sextic created by Silviana Amethyst. ©Katrin Boes / MPI-CBG