Modellansatz - English Episodes Only

Gudrun spent an afternoon at the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in the Sciences (MPI MSI) in Leipzig. There she met the Colombian mathematician Eliana Maria Duarte Gelvez. Eliana is a PostDoc at the MPI MSI in the Research group in Nonlinear Algebra. Its head is Bernd Sturmfels. They started the conversation with the question: What is algebraic geometry? It is a generalisation of what one learns in linear algebra insofar as it studies properties of polynomials such as its roots. But it considers systems of polynomial equations in several variables so-called multivariate polynomials. There are diverse applications in engineering, biology, statistics and topological data analysis. Among them Eliana is mostly interested in questions from computer graphics and statistics. In any animated movie or computer game all objects have to be represented by the computer. Often the surface of the geometric objects is parametrized by polynomials. The image of the parametrization can as well be defined by an equation.