Joël Ouaknine

"The Skolem Landscape"

( MPI-SWS talk in Kooperation mit dem Fachbereich Informatik)

The Skolem Problem asks how to determine algorithmically whether a given linear recurrence sequence (such as theFibonacci numbers) has a zero. It is a central question in dynamical systems and number theory, and has many connectionsto other branches of mathematics and computer science. Unfortunately, its decidability has been open for nearly acentury! In this talk, I will present a brief survey of what is known on the Skolem Problem and related questions,including recent and ongoing developments.

Bio: Joël Ouaknine is a Scientific Director at the Max Planck Institute for Software Systems in Saarbruecken, Germany. Hisresearch interests straddle theoretical computer science and mathematics, and lie mainly at the intersection ofdynamical systems and computation, making use of tools from number theory, Diophantine geometry, algebraic geometry, andmathematical logic. Joel studied mathematics at McGill University, and received a PhD in Computer Science from Oxford in2001. Hesubsequently held postdoc positions at Tulane University and Carnegie Mellon University, and became Full Professor ofComputer Science at Oxford in 2010. He received the Roger Needham Award in 2010, an ERC grant in 2015, and was electedmember of Academia Europaea in 2020; the same year he also received the Arto Salomaa Prize (jointly with James Worrell),for "outstanding contributions to Theoretical Computer Science, in particular to the theory of timed automata and to theanalysis of dynamical systems". He was elected Fellow of the ACM in 2021 for "contributions to algorithmic analysis ofdynamical systems".

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