Oberwolfach Seminars

The Oberwolfach Seminars are organized by leading experts in the field, and address excellent and promising Ph.D. students and postdocs (having received their PhD not more than 10 years ago) from all over the world. The aim is to introduce the participants to a particular hot development. The seminars take place at the Mathematisches Forschungsinstitut Oberwolfach. We are pleased that the Carl Friedrich von Siemens Foundation has decided to support the Oberwolfach Seminars from summer 2008 to 2025.

In order to make the Oberwolfach Seminars available to an even larger audience, the MFO supports the publication within the book series Oberwolfach Seminars, published in the Birkhäuser program of Springer Basel. We should like to express our sincere thanks for the combined efforts of the organizers to publish these Lecture notes. The organizers as well as the participants receive free copies of the respective Volume. Moreover, a copy of every volume will be exhibited in the library of the MFO.

Submission of Manuscripts

Published Volumes within the Series

Operation of the Seminars

On Sunday evening after dinner organizers and participants traditionally meet in order to introduce themselves informally. Every participant should present his interests to the others for some minutes.

Traditionally, the seminar talks of the organizers are in the morning (two lectures of about 1,5 hours or three of about one hour). After lunch there is an essential break offering the possibility to work on the given lectures. In the afternoon there should be no further seminar talks, but workshop sessions to give the participants the opportunity to deepen their knowledge by asking questions and discussing examples concerning the material/matter dealt with in the lectures. If possible there should be no lecture in the evening and talks of participants should be restricted to exceptional cases.

Annual decision of the seminar program

In addition to proposals from the scienific committee and advisory board of the MFO, the institute invites proposals for Oberwolfach Seminars from the whole mathematical community. Proposals from prospective organizers for an Oberwolfach Seminar in the following year are collected until end of July (deadline). The scientific committee then evaluates the proposals and decides on the Oberwolfach Seminar program in its October meeting.

A proposal (typical size is 1-3 pages, in English language) should contain the title, the proposed organizers and a description of the topic including new developments and thematical focus of the planned lectures given by the organizers. There should be 2-4 proposed organizers, please give full addresses and email addresses in the proposal (cv with publication list is recommended in case of junior researchers). The Institute wishes to increase the number of female participants. In view of this policy, proposals for seminars with at least one female organizer are strongly encouraged.

Moreover, please indicate which of the three traditional weeks of the prospective seminar would be possible for you: Every year, the seminars take place in the week over Pentecost, in the middle of October and in the Thanksgiving week (i.e., the week which contains the fourth Thursday of November).

In case that your proposal will be approved, we will publish a poster prior to the Oberwolfach Seminar. There will be a modest honorarium for the organizers to acknowledge the efforts to prepare the lectures.

Last but not least the MFO supports the publication of the content of the seminars in its book series Oberwolfach Seminars in collaboration with Birkhäuser/Springer Nature. If you are interested in a publication, please inform us in your proposal.

Please send the proposal as a pdf-attachment via email to the vice director of the MFO via

seminar-proposals@mfo.de

clearly indicating that it is a proposal for an Oberwolfach Seminar, not for an Oberwolfach Workshop.