Arnold Neumaier

Office: Oskar-Morgenstern-Platz 1, Room 04.136
Phone:+431 4277 50661
Email: Arnold.Neumaier@univie.ac.at
WWW: The rectorate does not allow me to link to my professional home page http://arnold-neumaier.at - thus you need to use copy and paste.

I am a mathematician and physicist at the University of Vienna, holding since 1994 the chair for computational mathematics at the Faculty of Mathematics. Since then my main scientific research has been in the fields of optimization, mathematical software, and data science. In addition, I have strong interests in computational quantum physics and its conceptual foundations.

Two years after my Ph.D., my formerly atheistic world view changed and I became a Christian. I got convinced that there is a very powerful God who created the Universe, who controls what appears to us to be chance, and who is interested in each of us individually. I understood (with Galilei, and later Newton and Maxwell) that God had written the book of nature in the language of mathematics. As a result of these insights, one of my main goals in life became to understand all the important applications of mathematics in other fields of science, engineering, and ordinary life. It is a challenge that keeps me learning all my life.

My faith and my understanding of God is the central motivation and moving power for my strong commitment to science. I always considered my faith as an integral part of my scientific work. From time to time, this has caused defamatory opposition from anti-religious quarters that began shortly after I came to Vienna, initially from the student organization Roter Vektor. (See also their most recent defamation campaign against me, dated June 13, 2022.)

I had addressed this already in my inaugural lecture in April 1995, where I had commented their slandering by citing the following lines from the Cherubinic Wanderer by Angelus Silesius. (Angelus Silesius: Sämtliche poetische Werke in drei Bänden. Band 3, München 1952, S. 36.)

Ich weiß, die Nachtigall
straft nicht des Kuckucks Ton;
Du aber, sing ich nicht wie du,
sprichst meinem Hohn.

(My rendering in English:)

I know the nightingale does not
find fault with cuckoo's song;
But you, if I don't sing like you,
mock mine as being wrong.

For related reasons, my professional web site was moved from here to a safer place. This move was completed on April 19, 2022.