Personnel announcements, Science policy

Karlsruhe, December 14, 2023 — The editors and partners of zbMATH Open (formerly "Zentralblatt für Mathematik"), FIZ Karlsruhe - Leibniz Institute for Information Infrastructure, the Heidelberg Academy of Sciences and Humanities and the European Mathematical Society have appointed Professor Dr. Christian Bär as new Editor-in-Chief. His research and teaching focuses on global analysis, differential geometry and applications in mathematical physics. He was President of the German Mathematical Society from 2011 to 2012.

Professor Bär succeeds Professor Dr. Klaus Hulek, who since 2016 has made a significant contribution to developing zbMATH into a world-leading information service for mathematical research and transforming it into an open access platform by the beginning of 2021. Since then, much of the zbMATH data has been freely available for research purposes and for linking with other, non-commercial services.

"Professor Bär has an excellent international network thanks to his long and successful scientific career and his involvement in numerous projects. This close connection to the community will help to further align zbMATH Open with the needs of mathematicians," says Professor Dr. Jan Philip Solovej, President of the European Mathematical Society.

Sabine Brünger-Weilandt, President & CEO of FIZ Karlsruhe, adds: "We are delighted that with Professor Bär we have once again been able to recruit a renowned mathematician as Editor-in-Chief for our flagship zbMATH Open. We are confident that his future commitment will open up new research areas and innovation potential for the information supply of the mathematical community and related sciences and make them usable."

Professor Dr. Christian Bär is looking forward to the new task: "It is as exciting as it is challenging. The aim is to take up and implement new ideas for the development and use of mathematical information - for example for formula searches or the recognition of mathematical entities and concepts for recommendation services and assistance systems in zbMATH Open. The latest advances in the field of AI, especially large language models, will play an important role in this."

zbMATH Open is an international open access information service for mathematics with networked information on mathematical topics, authors, publications, references and software. Links, not only to scientific publishers, but also to freely accessible repositories such as arXiv or EuDML, provide direct access to full texts. zbMATH Open emerged from the zbMATH database, based on the "Zentralblatt für Mathematik", with its complete record of mathematical research literature since 1886. In 2020/2021, the transformation into an open access platform took place with financial support from the federal and state governments. Since then, worldwide use has risen significantly.
More information is available at https://www.fiz-karlsruhe.de/en/produkte-und-dienstleistungen/zbmath-open .

FIZ Karlsruhe - Leibniz Institute for Information Infrastructure is one of the leading addresses for scientific information and services and a member of the Leibniz Association. Our core tasks are to provide science and industry with professional research and patent information and to develop innovative information infrastructures, with, for example, a focus on research data management, knowledge graphs and digital platforms. To this end, we conduct our own research, cooperate with renowned universities and research associations and are internationally and interdisciplinarily networked. FIZ Karlsruhe is a non-profit limited liability company and one of the largest non-academic institutions of its kind.

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Phone +49 7247 808-0
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