"Christian Hesse is one of the best-known mathematicians in Germany. Educated in Neu-Listernohl, a town with 1,500 inhabitants in the Sauerland region, he earned his doctorate in mathematics 21 years later at the renowned Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts (USA). From 1987 to 1991, he taught as an assistant professor at the University of California at Berkeley. In 1991, the then Minister President Erwin Teufel appointed the then 30-year-old as the youngest professor in the Federal Republic of Germany to Baden-Württemberg, where he took up a professorship in mathematics at the University of Stuttgart.

Hesse's professional lecture and travel activities span many parts of the world, from St. Petersburg to the Yucatan Peninsula to Easter Island, from Tahiti to Dublin to Cape Town. He spent research periods at the University of California at Santa Barbara from July 2012 to March 2013, from July 2014 to September 2014, and from July 2016 to September 2016.

He advised the German Constitutional Court on the 2012 election law ruling, the Stuttgart State Theater on the docu-drama "Quality Control" by the directing team Rimini Protokoll, and the U.S. government on data analytics issues. In 2010, he won a strongly contested draw against the reigning world chess champion, Indian grandmaster Viswanathan Anand, in a match in Zurich.

Hesse's research focuses on stochastics, the mathematics of random events. In addition to numerous mathematical publications, he has published a political science work on the Bundestag election law, two chess books, a primer on humor in science, and the international bestseller Why Mathematics Makes You Happy. One commentator called him "Germany's most versatile scientist," but he vehemently denies this, describing himself only as having below-average talent for concentrating on a single subject.

He answers the question about his main hobby with "living". Secondary hobbies are reading, writing, sleeping, chess. In 2006 he published a bestseller about it, Expeditions into the World of Chess, translated into several languages, praised by the Wiener Standard as "one of the wittiest and most readable books ever written about chess." He was named International Ambassador of the 2008 Chess Olympiad along with the Klitschko brothers, soccer coach Felix Magath, film producer Artur Brauner, actress and singer Vaile, and former world champion Anatoly Karpov."

From the author information of the publisher C.H. Beck

Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)

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Interview with Christian Hesse
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