Promotion lecture Professor in Mathematics

Abstract: With colleagues I have introduced a new real-valued invariant for Calabi-Yau manifolds. This and related questions have been at the heart of my research for the last few years. Providing formulas for this invariant is conjecturally related to questions about mirror symmetry. In our exploration of these formulas in three dimensions, we stumbled upon unexpected connections to isolated curve singularities, sparking a conjecture about certain numbers associated to such singularities.

I'll give a quick overview of this and provide a formulation of the conjecture.  While the conjecture can be expressed in elementary terms, it is seemingly not part of the mirror symmetry-literature or the literature on singularities.