Anges Handwerk and Harrie Willems have made a remarkable documentary about the life and work of Yuri Manin, Emeritus Director at the Max Institute for Mathematics in Bonn, who began his career as a student at Moscow State University in the year of Stalin's death 1953 and whose subsequent professional life reflects the history of mathematics and mathematicians trying to overcome the political constraints of that time. The film will be shown for the first time in Bonn, prior to its publication by Springer in 2012. The directors will be present and available for questions and discussion after the screening.
Yuri Ivanovich Manin started his distinguished career as scientist at Moscow State University. There he received his bachelor's degree in 1958 but, even before this, his first mathematics paper On cubic congruences to a prime modulus (Russian) appeared in print. He continued to undertake research at the Steklov Mathematical Institute in Moscow advised by Igor Shafarevitsch and after the award of his doctorate in 1960 he was appointed as Principal Researcher at the Steklov Mathematical Institute and professor for algebra at the Moscow State University. In 1991/92 he was at the Columbia University and till 1993 at the MIT, remaining , in absentia, a member of the Steklov Institut in Moscow. Since 1992 he is member of the scientific board of the Max Planck Institut for Mathematics in Bonn and was its director from 1993 to 2005. For him and his wife Xenia Semenova, Bonn became their main residence.
“The breadth of Manin's contributions have been remarkable. He has written papers on: algebraic geometry including ones on the Mordell conjecture for function fields and a joint paper with V Iskovskikh on the counter-example to the Lüroth problem; number theory including ones about torsion points on elliptic curves, p-adic modular forms, and on rational points on Fano varieties; and differential equations and mathematical physics including ones on string theory and quantum groups. He has also written famous papers on formal groups, the arithmetic of rational surfaces, cubic hypersurfaces, noncommutative algebraic geometry, instanton vector bundles and mathematical logic.”
About the directors of the film: Agnes Handwerk, Hamburg, and Harrie Willems, Amsterdam, both work as free journalists. They are the authors of the acclaimed documentary "Wolfgan Doeblin - A Mathematician Rediscovered". Agnes Handwerk recieved the Prize for Journalism of the German Mathematical Society DMV for a radio feature about Alexander Grothendieck.
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